Muslims Deserve President Who Defends Them When Attacked: Mosque bombed, Trump still silent

President Donald Trump desperately needs us all to know how important the battle against terrorism is to him. He tells us in speeches that he's "working night and day to keep our nation safe from terrorism." He flexes his Twitter fingers after any act of terror allegedly caused by a Muslim person hits nearly anywhere around the globe. But when an act of extremism appears to have been carried out against the Muslim community in the United States, he serves up radio silence.

At around 5 a.m. on August 5, a bomb exploded at the Dar Al Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, while more than a dozen Muslims from the community were inside preparing for Fajr, the early-morning prayer. No one was injured in the blast, which was reportedly caused by an IED (improvised explosive device) that started a fire in the office of the imam and president of the mosque. The FBI's Minneapolis division has stated that the mosque bombing is a top priority. At a news conference, the FBI special agent in charge of the investigation, Rick Thornton, said, "At this point, our focus is to determine who and why.... Is it a hate crime? Is it an act of terror." Mark Dayton, the governor of Minnesota, labeled the attack "a criminal act of terrorism."

Though a major American intelligence agency is taking this very seriously, the White House's response to the bombing came from Trump's national security adviser Sebastian Gorka, who stated that the White House will not comment on the bombing because it may have been a fake hate crime.

"There’s a great rule: All initial reports are false," he said. But Trump rarely waits on facts before oozing out an unqualified, nonfactual take about a potential terror incident that has been allegedly carried out by a Muslim extremist. The president has remained active on Twitter since the bombing but has made no mention of this apparent terror attack, because Gorka's "great rule" is never applied by Trump when the narrative of an issue can fit into his myopic, xenophobic worldview.

According to The Washington Post, Trump tweeted about Muslims and terrorism three and a half hours after the 2015 attacks in Paris, then within 90 minutes after a shooting in San Bernardino, California, on December 2, 2015, and after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando on June 12, 2016, he lashed out at Muslims and terrorism within six hours (it occurred overnight, which possibly delayed his response).

Trump has a track record of immediately denouncing acts of terror committed by Muslim extremists while simultaneously ignoring acts of terror committed against the Muslim community. So as the Post article appropriately asks, "Why won't Donald Trump rush to tweet criticism of attacks on Muslims?" Trump doesn't often condemn Islamophobic attacks — and his silence may be interpreted as way of condoning them.

Trump seems to view all Muslims as extremists essentially stereotyping a global community of 1.8 billion people as potential terror threats, which makes absolutely no sense. From his irrational and offensive December 2015 statement, in which he called for banning Muslims from entering America, to Trump's actual travel bans — the first of which was issued in January and aimed at seven predominantly Muslim countries — it's been clear that his interest is less about protecting Americans and more about framing Islam as a regressive and dangerous religion.

His disdain for the Muslim community led him to launch an unprecedented attack on Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the gold-star Muslim American parents of Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 during the Iraq War. Trump suggested that Ghazala, who seemed choked up alongside her husband when he spoke publicly about their son at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, didn't speak more because of repressive Islamic rules. He even attacked Sadiq Khan, the Muslim mayor of London, a day after a terrorist attack in the city on June 3, 2017, killed seven and injured dozens more. To call Trump's Islamophobia incidental is to pretend that his streak of appalling and continual disrespect is somehow just an immense coincidence.

But in these days and times, anti-Muslim bias is not circumstantial; it's unrelenting. This population of Americans is currently faced with hatred and violence. The Council on American-Islamic Affairs (CAIR) documented a 57% increase in anti-Muslim bias incidents and a 44% increase in hate crimes targeting Muslims in 2016 over the previous year. Recent headlines include the murder of Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche and Ricky John Best, who defended a young woman in a hijab and another teen from a knife-wielding racist on the eve of Ramadan, and the the assault and murder of 17-year-old Nabra Hassanen during Ramadan. Neither incident warranted a timely sentiment of remorse from Trump to the victims or an impassioned statement against the dangers of extremist terror (although Nabra's death wasn't investigated as a hate crime, I believe that it definitely should have been).

In Canada, just two days after Trump announced his travel ban, a mass shooting occurred in the province where I was born, Quebec. It resulted in the tragic deaths of six Muslim Canadian citizens, and 19 others were wounded. Trump reportedly called Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau to offer his condolences, but he didn't issue a public denouncement. The suspect, a 27-year-old white male named Alexandre Bissonnette, was reportedly an unabashed supporter of Donald Trump online.

Had it been a Muslim man who murdered six Christians in a church days out from the initiation of Trump's Muslim ban, would his reaction have been confined to a private phone call or would it have been a nonstop barrage of bigoted fire and brimstone tweets?

Despite calls for Trump to condemn this week's attack in Minnesota, he has instead focused his attention on The New York Times "failing", muttering about "fake news", and deriding Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal as a "Vietnam con artist." Trump’s twitter enables us to collectively see into his mind and his heart, and what it has shown is that he cares more about bullying a war vet rather than showing basic humanity to an American community that has already suffered 63 publicly reported mosque attacks nationwide so far in 2017.

It's too late now. Any disavowal of the domestic terrorism that occurred in Minnesota would be nothing more than a forced sentiment, stemming more from an insistence to get his detractors off his back, rather than something genuine. The sad truth is the 45th president of the United States is disinterested in being the president of all Americans.

Here is another TEEN VOGUE article:

Transgender Military Kids Also Deserve Access to Health Care

Jessica Girven AUG 7, 2017
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/transgender-military-kids-also-deserve-access-to-health-care

In this op-ed, Jessica Girven explains the plight her daughter, 11-year-old Blue, has faced while trying to transition as transgender military kid.

I'm the mother of a sweet, bubbly 11-year-old girl named Blue. She's just like every other little girl around, but with a few exceptions — it's not her bright blue hair, nor the fact that our family of six is currently stationed in Ramstein Air Base in Germany. What makes Blue unique is that she's a transgender military kid.

Since she was very young, Blue had complained of feeling that she was in the wrong body, so I wasn't surprised when she came out to me after watching an episode of RuPaul's Drag Race.

Another TEEN VOGUE article by the same author

Mohamed Noor Is Proof That “Blue Lives” Are a Falsehood

Temporarily donning a blue uniform doesn’t erase skin color.

by Lincoln Anthony BladesJUL 26, 2017
http://www.teenvogue.com/story/mohamed-noor-is-proof-that-blue-lives-are-a-falsehood

On July 15, Justine Damond called Minneapolis police twice to report that she was either hearing a woman “having sex or being raped.” When they arrived, officer Mohamed Noor allegedly heard a loud noise and drew his service weapon, opening fire from the passenger seat through the driver’s-side window as 40-year-old Justine, clad in pajamas, approached the squad car to speak with the officers she had summoned.

Like the 100+ killings of unarmed citizens in 2015 alone, the incident was avoidable.

The reactions from both police and civilians are what make this case different from so many other fatal police shootings, as Noor is a Muslim, Somali-American immigrant, and Justine Damond was white.

Suddenly, in a nation where a police officer’s word has become sacrosanct and their fear is considered unimpeachable, many who reach to find excuses to absolve officers of guilt — no matter how egregious their actions are — have abruptly reversed course to become critical of the police.

They’ve bemoaned Noor’s hiring, that he was allowed to remain on the force with prior allegations of abuse levied against him, and even the fact that he was fast-tracked through the city’s police cadet program, which is an option made available to cadets who already have college degrees.

According to CNN, Noor arrived in the U.S. at a young age and graduated from Augsburg College in Minneapolis, earning a degree in economics and business administration. He joined the Minneapolis Police Department in 2015 and completed field training.

Although Minnesota has the largest Somali-American population in the country, Noor became the first Somali-American cop assigned to patrol the city’s Fifth Precinct in 2016.

His badge hasn’t shielded him from Islamophobia, anti-black racism, and anti-immigrant bigotry, proof that we all must stop lending any serious credence to the idea that police officers are, in and of themselves, a threatened minority deserving to be treated as a protected group — which is what “blue lives” are supposed to be.

Usually among those who support police, “blue lives” matter above all — but in this case, when a black cop kills a white woman, his status as an officer matters little.

Michele Bachmann, a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Minnesota (who also briefly campaigned for president in 2012) even said, “He violated police policy and training. Noor refuses to cooperate with investigators. He refuses to give a statement. Firing him isn’t enough, the question is whether a grand jury will be impaneled. Manslaughter charges should be considered.”
Bachmann, like many other pro-police white Americans, has consistently remained silent about black Americans killed by officers, only to now impugn this one particular cop.

Mohamed Noor isn’t being treated as one of the blue: he’s being treated as a black, Muslim, Somali-American immigrant, and is therefore being saddled with oppressive prejudices that come along with such an identity in the U.S.

Media headlines overtly mentioned Noor’s religion with his title, an incumbrance never attached to white, Christian officers, and his dual-citizen status was also blatantly used in headlines. The entire scenario has been full of double standards because the officer doesn’t fit the typical profile of the privilege extended to the “blue.”
Here, black and white has not only overshadowed blue, but completely erased it’s faux-existence. Noor has been unable to access the privileges that have been afforded to other police who kill. His “blue”-ness hasn’t shielded him in the manner it has his colleagues, and that has everything to do with his ethnicity.

The accountability that is being demanded in this case has just as much to do with the racial identity of the officer as it does the racial identity of the victim.

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