SFGate.com, in its recap of the Democratic presidential debate held last night, reports that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that the rhetoric of Republican front-runner Donald Trump is driving Muslims to join the Islamic State:
“The Democratic front-runner, kept much of her focus on the general election, sharply criticizing Donald Trump's plan to ban Muslims from entering the United States. She called the leader of the GOP race the Islamic State's best recruiter. ‘Mr. Trump has a great capacity to use bluster and bigotry to inflame people,’ said Clinton, the former secretary of state.”
The idea that a Muslim, who is otherwise peaceful, believes in moderation, modernity and basic human rights, would join up with a vicious retrograde terrorist group like ISIS because a real estate developer running for his party’s nomination for the presidency of the United States said something he did not like is total and utter nonsense.
While much of what Trump says is likely offensive to Muslims—probably more here than abroad—the problem is not his words. The problem is that those even contemplating joining ISIS or joining any one of the other hundreds of Islamist terror groups operating in the Muslim world is that today's Islamic culture is producing people who are immoderate in their beliefs, intolerant of other religions, full of hatred and envy and who reject liberal democracy and all the freedom and messiness that liberty has to offer.
Secretary Clinton may be right to criticize the bigoted views of Mr. Trump and his throng of supporters. But she is wrong to think Trump can move someone to become a terrorist. Where we all need to look is at the culture of intolerance and victimhood in every Muslim country—there is no exception to this—which has led the most extreme believers and those who see themselves as the biggest failures to want to use terrorist violence to advance their sick cause.
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