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One of Clinton's leading donors, billionaire Haim Saban, has given Clinton's super PAC at least $2 million and recently suggested that Muslims should face "more scrutiny and that profiling of Muslims should be permissible. "The reality is that certain things that are unacceptable in times of peace โ such as profiling, listening in on anyone and everybody who looks suspicious, or interviewing Muslims in a more intense way than interviewing Christian refugees โ is all acceptable [during war]."
Following a recent trend, Hillary Clinton has also gone on to praise George W. Bush for his post-9/11 response to Islamophobia. Six days after the September 11 attacks George W. Bush spoke at the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., saying, among other things, that "Islam is peace." "America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country...And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect." Yet the Bush administration that went on to torture and extrajudicially execute Muslims and deprive countless Muslims of their civil liberties.
Another arm of anti-Muslim bigotry is the drive for militarism, which both the Democrats and Republicans share, each using their own respective arguments in support of some variation of war-chasing. Hillary Clinton, lauded by progressives for her role as Secretary of State, pushed forescalating the war in Afghanistan, attempted to pressure Obama into maintaining U.S. troop presence in Iraq, voted for the Patriot Act in 2001 and again to reauthorize it in 2006, and pledged to further arm Israel while also threatening Iran.
The expansion of U.S. belligerence across much of the world has funneled billions into the arms and defense industry as well as aided local and national policy-makers in normalizing anti-Muslim enmity by way of surveillance programs, the banning of Shari'a law, and the recruitment of native "terror informants." The more entrenched the U.S. military becomes the easier it will be for Muslims, both local and abroad, to be otherized for sake of fighting terror. That the most basic of human rights are now being debated by candidates vying for an opportunity to become the next Commander in Chief has yet to genuinely register with either political camp, especially not those pardoning Clinton's hawkishness.
Anti-Muslim animus goes far beyond ornamented stenographers to power obsessing over the statements of Donald Trump. It is systematic, and often cloaked in the language of humanitarian hyper-militarism and even inclusion. Despite Hillary Clinton's sentimental rhetoric, her policies and political affiliations are concrete and show that she has never been a friend to Muslims, nor will her administration be one.
The author is a prominent Russian journalist, part-time conservative politician, who coined the term "Russian Spring" during the 2014 anti-putsch movements in the Crimea and Donbass.The Russian President recently said patriotism is a Russian national ideal. But Russia is a country of paradoxes: pro-Western ideology has been a no less important but much more powerful ideology than patriotism. Westerners thought Russia didn't have the right to exist as an independent nation. Our only job was to self-destruct by dissolving into the West.
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