Trump's Plan to End Islamic Extremism Is His Most Extreme Idea Yet
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GOP Presidential candidate and businessman Donald Trump suggested on Monday that some mosques in the U.S. be shut down after deadly attacks in Paris last week reignited fear over Islamic extremism and the stream of Syrian refugees fleeing violence from extremist groups like the Islamic State.
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"I would hate to do it but it's something you're going to have to strongly consider," Trump said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" Monday. "Some of the absolute hatred is coming from those areas," he added.
"You're going to have to watch and study the mosques because a lot of talking is going on at the mosques, and from what I've heard... in the old days, we had great surveillance going on at the mosques in and around New York City," he said in a dig at New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, who curbed surveillance of mosques in NYC.
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Over the weekend, Islamic State claimed responsibility for the deadly attacks on Friday night that left 129 dead and hundreds more injured. Authorities also announced that a passport found at the scene of one attack belonged to a Syrian man who had passed through Greece, suggesting that militants might have traveled alongside refugees fleeing the violence perpetrated by those very groups.
This discovery combined with the climate of fear, led the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, to make a similar suggestion to Trump's in a Sunday appearance on French television. "I don't expect the state of emergency for me to attack preachers of hate, but the state of emergency should allow us to act more rapidly," he said, according to MSNBC.
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Both statements echo previous suggestions by the politicians. In October, Trump said that we should "Absolutely" close mosques where a worshiper is linked to Islamic State. "I think it's great," he said of British Prime Minister David Cameron's recent proposal to do the same thing.
Cazeneuve, for his part, has been an active participant in deporting 40 Muslim imams out of the country in the last three years, ThinkProgress reports. "Foreign preachers of hate will be deported," Cazeneuve said in June.
The Paris attacks have reinstated an international conversation about Islamic extremism, measures to protect against it, and the possibility of an international military response to the chaotic warfare in Iraq and Syria. On Monday, President Barack Obama ruled out sending more ground troops to fight against Islamic State militants, and reiterated his stance on the importance of accepting refugees.
We "have to remember that many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves—that's what they're fleeing," he said at a G 20 summit in Turkey. "Slamming the door in their face would be a betrayal of our values."
