According to Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa.), it’s not Republicans’ anti-Muslim rhetoric and over a decade of ongoing, endless war in the Middle East that has bred a backlash against Islam in the United States: it’s President Obama’s apparent refusal to publicly use a term.
The senator made the comment on Wednesday, as GOP party leaders and rank-and-file alike scrambled to distance themselves from a bigoted proposal by Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump. The heir businessman turned politician called on federal officials to stop all Muslims from entering the US after the Dec. 2 San Bernardino shootings.
“I fear one of the reasons for the regrettable backlash against Muslims in this country is the public’s frustration with the president’s repeated failure to acknowledge the actual nature of the threat we face,” Grassley said in prepared remarks at the top of a judiciary committee hearing. “His reluctance to utter the words: ‘radical Islamic terrorism.'”
Right-wing critics of President Obama have repeatedly claimed he is not taking the Islamic State (ISIL) seriously, despite the fact that the US has conducted thousands of airstrikes on targets in Iraq and Syria since September 2014. Many argue, as evidence of this, that he refuses to identify the “Islamic” nature of the threat.
President Obama defended his rhetoric in February during a White House conference on violent extremism, stating that he doesn’t believe organizations such as ISIL and al-Qaeda are examples of “radical Islam.”
“They no more represent Islam than any madman who kills in the name of Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism,” he said.
“We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people have perverted Islam” the president added. “No religion is responsible for terrorism. People are responsible for violence and terrorism.”
Both before and after the ISIL-influenced attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, GOP presidential candidates have called for policies that specifically discriminate against Muslims. Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called for religious tests to allow only Christian Syrian refugees haven within the US. Prior to the attacks, Dr. Ben Carson claimed that American Muslims should be ineligible to be President of the United States.
No one in the field, however, has promoted distrust toward Islam more than the candidate currently leading the pack. Donald Trump has called for the closing down of mosques, the establishment of a database on American Muslims, and now, as of this week, a total restriction on Muslims entering the United States—including US citizens living abroad.
“In 20 years I have not heard such intolerance and hatred from political leaders in this society,” Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations told The Guardian last month.
“We are talking about America in the 21st-century potentially about to be led by dangerous people,” he said.
Incidents of Islamophobia, meanwhile, are making their way into the national press. In Philadelphia on Monday, for example, a severed pigs head was thrown at a mosque.
The ranking member of the Senator Judiciary Committee, Sen. Pat Leahy (R-Vt.) sharply contrasted his remarks with those of Chairman Grassley.
ISIL “actively promotes the narrative around the world that Muslims are not welcome in the United States,” Sen. Leahy said in prepared remarks.
“Certainly some of that what I’ve called reprehensible and even unconstitutional comments by some allow them to spread that false motion around the world,” he added.
