7 Lies Trump Is Telling About Terrorism
After one bomb injured more than two dozen in New York, and others were discovered in New York and New Jersey this week, terrorism is again a fiery campaign issue. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton called her Republican opponent Donald Trump a “recruiting sergeant for the terrorists,” arguing that ISIS and other Islamic terror organizations want a religious war, and Trump walks right into their hands. “They are looking to make this into a war against Islam, rather than a war against jihadists, violent terrorists,” she said. “The kinds of rhetoric and language Mr. Trump has used is giving aid and comfort to our adversaries.” Trump in turn said Clinton was responsible for allowing terrorists to thrive in the United States and reiterated his call for stricter immigration policies, blaming our current immigration system for these latest bombings. “These attacks, and many others, were made possible because of our extremely open immigration system,” he said.
In typical self-aggrandizing fashion, Trump boasted that he had been right that there was a bomb: “I should be a newscaster,” he said. “I called it before the news.” Statements like this are typical for the candidate, who seems to enjoy his own version of reality - including when it comes to terrorism and national defense.
Terrorism is scary - that’s the point. It kills innocent people, but it also interferes with our rights to move freely, to feel safe and secure, to go about the normal business of our lives. It terrorizes, physically and psychologically, which is why it’s such a powerful tool. It’s a scourge that our next president will be tasked to fight, and combating it will be difficult and complicated. Which is why our potential leaders should approach our national defense with the gravity and honesty demanded of such grim and serious issues, and why the American people would be best served by an election that pits two thoughtful candidates against each other. Unfortunately, that is not this election. Instead of offering a conservative counter to Clinton, Trump offers vitriol - and, just as often, outright lies. Here are seven of them.
1. Hillary Clinton wants Americans to be vulnerable to terrorist attacks. "Clinton wants to allow radical Islamic terrorists to pour into our country,” Trump said in a June speech on terrorism, after Omar Mateen went on a shooting rampage at an Orlando nightclub, killing dozens (Trump also claimed he would “not use or ever say” the killer’s name, after releasing a statement saying, “The terrorist, Omar Mir Saddique Mateen, is the son of an immigrant from Afghanistan”).
It should go without saying that a candidate for the presidency of the United States does not in fact want to allow radical terrorists, Islamic or otherwise, to pour into the United States. In fact, Clinton has released a plan that, though vague, outlines a series of steps she would take to counter terrorism threats in the U.S. and abroad. It includes intensifying air strikes against ISIS strongholds, working with technology companies to combat online terrorism recruitment and communications, leveraging diplomatic relationships, building ties with American Muslims and community leaders who can help root out and fight against homegrown radicalism, and boosting the intelligence-gathering capabilities of our law enforcement and national security officers.
For liberals, there are reasons for alarm in Clinton’s plan - it hinges partly on militarism and surveillance, of which progressives are critical. The left-wing concern, though, is that Clinton’s plan could be too aggressive, at the expense of civil liberties at home and innocent life overseas. But that Clinton would allow terrorists to enter the country, or even create conditions under which they could “pour in” is simply false.
2. Refugees present a significant terrorist threat. According to Trump, there is a "tremendous flow of Syrian refugees into the United States” and “we don’t know who they are, they have no documentation, and we don’t know what they’re planning.”
“Altogether, under the Clinton plan, you'd be admitting hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East with no system to vet them, or to prevent the radicalization of their children,” Trump said. “The burden is on Hillary Clinton to tell us why she believes immigration from these dangerous countries should be increased without any effective system to screen who we are bringing in.”
If this were true, and the U.S. government were opening its doors to whoever wanted to walk through with no vetting, that would be scary and a terrible immigration policy. Luckily, Trump’s characterization of Clinton’s plan is outrageously false. The U.S. screening process for refugees is detailed and onerous. First, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has to identify you as a refugee; UNHCR works around the world, with missions in war-stricken nations (and some of their neighbors) to help displaced people either go home voluntarily, seek asylum or resettle in another nation, or settle in the country to which they have fled. UNHCR helps to figure out which refugees are eligible to be resettled, and refers some of those refugees to the United States and other countries. Then the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program takes over, screening refugees using “intensive biographic and biometric security checks” and, if the refugee passes those checks, the refugee undergoes an interview designed to check for fraud and make sure the refugee’s claim is valid under U.S. law. Syrian applicants have to go through an additional “enhanced review” process. And when refugees arrive in the United States, Customs and Border Patrol conducts another inspection. This process typically takes between 18 months and two years.
While some refugees do in fact have documentation, contrary to Trump’s claim, he is right that many lack it - it’s easy to lose your birth certificate if your house is bombed or if you take a raft across the Mediterranean with only the clothes on your back. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to verify the claims made by refugees.
The current screening process would remain in place with a Clinton presidency. While there’s certainly room to quibble about the details, and to suggest ways to make it stronger and better able to serve people in need of refuge, it’s a lie to say there is “no system to vet” refugees.
It’s also simply not true that Syrian refugees are flowing into the U.S. in “tremendous” numbers. There are indeed a tremendous number of Syrian refugees: Approximately 5.2 million Syrians are seeking refuge outside of their homeland. But the United States only agreed to take 10,000 of them this fiscal year, a number we just reached at the end of August (the fiscal year ends in September). That’s one-fifth of 1 percent of the number in need - hardly tremendous.
It is true that Clinton wants to increase the number of Syrian refugees the United States resettles, to as many as 65,000. As it stands, most refugees that come to the United States aren’t Syrian - from October 2015 to May 2016, they hailed primarily from Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, and Iraq. Syria, which has the highest numbers of refugees in the world, was the sixth-largest sender of refugees to the United States, right behind Bhutan.
And of all the threats facing Americans, refugee terrorists are fairly low on the list. According to the right-leaning libertarian Cato Institution, each year, the chance of any American being killed by a refugee in a terrorist attack is 1 in 3.64 billion.
3. President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton cower to political correctness by refusing to name our real enemy. A favorite Trump talking point is that because Obama and Clinton won’t use the phrase “radical Islamic terror,” they are unfit to hold office. “Hillary Clinton - for months and despite so many attacks - repeatedly refused to even say the words 'radical Islam,' until I challenged her yesterday to say the words or leave the race,” Trump said. According to him, “Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country.”
It is true that both Clinton and Obama avoid the specific phrase “radical Islam” or “radical Islamic terrorism,” which is favored on the American right. They do so at the advice of terrorism experts: One goal of ISIS is to pit what they believe to be true Islam against evil unbelievers, so it’s strategically smart (not to mention true) for world leaders to reject that binary and insist that a religion practiced by nearly a quarter of the world’s population does not have to be aligned with violence and terror.
"What exactly would using this label would accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to try to kill Americans?" Obama has said. "Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? The answer is none of the above." But it could make many Muslims feel even more marginalized and unmoored - which could in turn contribute to ISIS recruitment, as the group typically recruits angry, unmoored young men who feel rejected and impotent, and are seeking a sense of grandiosity and purpose.
4. Obama and Clinton created ISIS. Trump has toned down his claim that the president “is the founder of ISIS” and now says, “The rise of ISIS is the direct result of policy decisions made by President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton.”
It’s always a challenge to look back at what could have been, but there’s a good argument that ISIS would not have existed had the U.S. not invaded Iraq and that its founding goes back to that conflict. About that, Trump says, “I was an opponent of the Iraq War from the beginning - a major difference between me and my opponent.” This is not true: Trump was on record as supporting the Iraq invasion, although he changed his mind when it became clear the war was a pointless quagmire (the Iraq War was also a George W. Bush initiative that Obama had nothing to do with; Clinton did, as a senator, vote to authorize the invasion).
While Trump is correct that some policy decisions made by President Obama and then-Secretary of State Clinton may have contributed to the growth of ISIS, and that certainly the Iraq invasion and later the war in Syria were major contributors, the question of what “caused” ISIS is a complex one with no single answer. When it comes to Syria and ISIS, the confluence of events leading to today’s chaos is so complex that it’s difficult to look at the Obama administration’s decisions and play out what would have happened if they had been made differently - in any case, it seems unlikely ISIS would have been defeated. Maybe they could have been weakened; maybe the other options on the table would have made them stronger. What we do know is that Trump supported pretty much every policy decision he now says led to ISIS, making it less clear how he would handle similar foreign policy challenges if he were in the Oval Office.
5. Hillary Clinton says the solution to terrorism is to ban guns. “Hillary Clinton says the solution is to ban guns,” Trump said in his terrorism speech in June. “Her plan is to disarm law-abiding Americans, abolishing the Second Amendment, and leaving only the bad guys and terrorists with guns. She wants to take away Americans’ guns, then admit the very people who want to slaughter us.”
Clinton has never said she wants to disarm law-abiding Americans or abolish the Second Amendment. What she has said is that she thinks people on the terrorist watch list shouldn’t be able to buy guns - a sentiment with which Trump has agreed.
6. Trump’s immigration plan will prevent domestic terrorism. The Trump anti-terrorism plan is directly tied to immigration - even his big speech on terrorism was an address on “terrorism, immigration, and national security.” To fight the terrorist threat, Trump said, "I will suspend immigration from areas of the world where there is a proven history of terrorism against the United States, Europe, or our allies."
According to Peter Bergen, a national security expert, Trump’s plan ignores the reality of terrorism in the United States: It’s not carried out by foreigners or new immigrants. “Here's the critical question,” Bergen wrote for CNN.com. “Would this vague plan to suspend immigration solve the problem of terrorism in the States? Hardly. Since 9/11, every lethal jihadist terrorist attack in this country has been carried out by an American citizen or legal resident.” Some of these attackers were children of immigrants. But, Bergen writes, “For Trump's plan to work, you would somehow have to wind the clock back a half-century and ban immigration from all Muslim countries until now. Since even Trump doesn't claim he can reverse time, his proposal for a temporary ban is fatuous.”
If you look at all acts of domestic terrorism, most aren’t related to Islamic extremists but to right-wing groups, from abortion opponents to white nationalists. Banning immigration from areas of the world with “a proven history of terrorism against the United States” wouldn’t do much to stop terrorism.
7. Average Muslims cover up terrorism and protect terrorists. According to Trump, American Muslims routinely protect their own, having the opportunity to foil terrorism plots but not doing so. He played on this claim during his post-Orlando terrorism speech, saying, “The Muslims have to work with us. They have to work with us. They know what’s going on. They know that he was bad. They knew the people in San Bernardino were bad. But you know what, they didn’t turn ‘em in. And we had death and destruction.”
“A neighbor saw suspicious behavior,” Trump claimed. “Bombs on the floor and other things, but didn’t warn authorities because they said they didn’t want to be accused of racial profiling.”
This isn’t true - there have been no credible reports that a neighbor saw bombs and declined to tell police because of fear of racial profiling. There is no indication that other Muslims know what the San Bernardino killers were planning.
There is evidence, though, that many jihadist terrorist plots have been foiled because of other Muslims. “Around a third of all the terrorism cases investigated since 9/11 originated with a tip from a member of the Muslim community or a family member,” wrote Bergen for CNN, citing data from the New America Foundation. “In quiet ways far too complex to hold Trump's interest, Muslims in the United States and around the world are helping every day to prevent massacres such as Orlando from happening.”
Muslims are killed in terror attacks here and abroad. Muslims routinely work in their mosques and their communities and their families to thwart the extremism that can lead to terrorism, and to work with law enforcement to make sure extremists don’t do even more damage. Like most Americans, American Muslims also abhor terroristic violence - the vast majority of American Muslims believe violence against civilians in the name of Islam is never justified - and want to protect themselves, their families, and their country.
The overwhelming majority of American Muslims don’t “have to work with us.” They are us.
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