American television journalist Tom Brokaw offered some much-needed perspective on Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the U.S. on Tuesday.

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In a segment on NBC's Nightly News, Brokaw cautioned that Trump's proposal "is more, much more, than a shouted campaign provocation," comparing the move to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Nazi persecution of Jews, and McCarthyism.

"Trump's statement, even in the season of extremes, is a dangerous proposal that overrides history, the law, and the foundation of America itself," Brokaw said. "In my lifetime alone, we have been witness to the consequences of paranoia overriding reason."

The journalist pointed to examples from throughout world history where fear and hatred of other races or religions—whether it was Japanese Americans, Jewish people in Germany, or Black people in the Jim Crow era—led to internment, genocide, and systemic oppression, respectively.

By stoking fears about Islamic extremists in America, Trump is allowing that same type of bigotry to inform his policy proposals, despite the fact that discriminatory actions against Muslim Americans feeds directly into the agenda of terrorist groups such as ISIS and also ignores the service and sacrifice of Muslims in the U.S. military.

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"Yes, the jihadists are radical Muslims, but they're a minority in a world with a billion and a half Muslims," Brokaw says, walking through Arlington National Cemetery, where Muslim American servicemen who died in combat are buried and honored. "Even so, defeating ISIS will be long, hard, and expensive—perhaps even more so now because ISIS is likely to use Donald Trump's statements as a recruiting tool."