Trump Says American Muslims May Need To Register And Carry Special IDs
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump contends the US should keep very close tabs on American Muslims.
During a recent interview with Yahoo! News, Trump said he wouldn't rule out warrantless searches, as well as registering all Muslims in the US in a database. What's more, he also suggested Muslims should have to carry a special type of identification.
He said,
We're going to have to do things that we never did before. And some people are going to be upset about it, but I think that now everybody is feeling that security is going to rule. And certain things will be done that we never thought would happen in this country in terms of information and learning about the enemy. And so we're going to have to do certain things that were frankly unthinkable a year ago. We're going to have to -- we're going to have to look at a lot of things very closely. We're going to have to look at the mosques. We're going to have to look very, very carefully.
This comes not long after Trump said he would "strongly consider" shutting down mosques in the US as a consequence of the Paris terror attacks.
Everything Trump is suggesting surrounding American Muslims is not only offensive and inherently Islamophobic but also unconstitutional.
It's unsettlingly reminiscent of discriminatory policies the Nazis instituted to persecute Jews throughout the 1930s. During that period, Jews faced extreme restrictions in essentially every single aspect of their lives. This was the prelude to the Holocaust.
Around 1938, all Jews were forced to start carrying identification cards designating them as Jewish. Their passports were also stamped with the letter "J."
This happened around the same time as Kristallnacht, or the "Night of Broken Glass," when the Nazis sanctioned the destruction of Jewish property across Germany, parts of Austria and in parts of the Sudetenland in then Czechoslovakia.
On November 9 and 10, 1938, many Jewish homes and businesses, as well as 267 synagogues, were destroyed and thousands of Jewish men were arrested and taken to concentration camps.
What Trump is suggesting for Muslims sounds all too familiar in this regard, and he's walking down a very dangerous road.
The Nazis sought to track and limit everything about the lives of Jews, and the regime destroyed anything related to Judaism.
No group of people should be singled out on the basis of religion. Any such policies would violate the ideals the US was founded upon, not to mention the Constitution.
What Trump is calling for is not only unethical and bigoted, it's un-American.
Citations: Donald Trump has big plans for 'radical Islamic' terrorists, 2016 and 'that communist' Bernie Sanders (Yahoo!), Donald Trump: 'Strongly consider' shutting mosques (CNN)
