Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a Muslim-American, so, and you won’t believe this, he’s not the biggest fan of presidential candidate Donald Trump, who wants Muslims banned from America and doesn’t believe there are any Muslim athletes. As a matter of fact, in a column for TIME, Abdul-Jabbar levels readers with an obvious truth: Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric makes him an extension of the terror group, ISIS.
From the piece, which is worth your time:
If violence can be an abstraction — and it can; that’s what a threat is — the Trump campaign meets this definition. Thus, Trump is ISIS’s greatest triumph: the perfect Manchurian Candidate who, instead of offering specific and realistic policies, preys on the fears of the public, doing ISIS’s job for them. Even fellow Republican Jeb Bush acknowledged Trump’s goal is “to manipulate people’s angst and fears.”
Abdul-Jabbar’s argument is that by fanning the flames of fear against Muslims, that can lead to violence against Muslims, which is what ISIS is after in the first place. It’s a sound argument, and it’s one made by an extremely popular American athlete who converted to Islam in 1968. There is no shortage of screeds pointing out the idiocy of Trump, but to get such intelligent words from someone of Abdul-Jabbar’s credentials and status, maybe it opens the eyes of Trump supporters who fail to see that…
…nah, that won’t happen.
(Via TIME)
