Trump defends Muslim ban, claiming police avoid ‘radicalized’ areas of Paris and London, and saying of US Muslims: ‘We love you. We want to work with you’

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump defended his plan to temporarily halt all Muslim entry to the United States on Tuesday, a proposal roundly condemned by fellow Republicans and met with horror by American Muslim leaders.

“We’re not talking about the Japanese internment camps, not at all, but we have to get our hands around a very serious problem,” Trump told Joe Scarborough on the MSNBC morning political talkshow Morning Joe, referring to the second world war-era camps where Japanese Americans were placed. Victims of those racist policies have since been apologized to and given reparations by the American government.

'I. Don't. Care': Trump brushes off horrified reaction to his Muslim ban Read more

Trump proposed the “total and complete shutdown” of Muslims’ entry into the United States on Monday evening, hours before a campaign rally on the USS Yorktown, a second world war aircraft carrier berthed near Charleston, South Carolina.

The statement came in response to a shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people. The FBI is investigating the massacre as an act of terrorism inspired by Isis. Trump remains the frontrunner in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump said critics of his plan to stop Muslims from entering the country “[have] been condemning practically everything I say and yet they come to my side”.

“The ones that aren’t on my side are down to about zero in the polls and aren’t going to go anywhere.”

Arguing in support of his plan, Trump repeated debunked claims that neighborhoods in London and Paris have become “so radicalized” that police refuse to go there.

“Paris is no longer the safe city it was. They have sections in Paris that are radicalized, where the police refuse to go there. They’re petrified. The police refuse to go in there,” Trump said, refusing to name specific neighborhoods in the city. “We have places in London and other places that are so radicalized that the police are afraid for their own lives. We have to be very smart and very vigilant.”

During his campaign, Trump has already said that he would support a database of American Muslims; would consider a special ID for Muslims; that police should surveil mosques; and that Muslims in Jersey City, New Jersey cheered after the World Trade Center fell.

The candidate appeared to invoke President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s second world war-era proclamations as support for his proposals.

“[The proposal is] not unconstitutional, keeping people out until we get a hold on what’s going on, Joe,” Trump said. Roosevelt started internment camps “because he had to do it,” adding: “Look, we are at war with radical Islam.”



The proclamations Trump referred to – Nos 2525, 2526 and 2527 – sent thousands of people of German, Italian and Japanese descent to internment camps in the United States. People of those ancestries were rounded up, arrested and investigated by the US. In addition, more than 15 countries in Latin America took up America’s offer to intern people of those nationalities living within their countries – and deported more than 6,600 individuals to the US, according to the National Archives.

Trump again cited his support for a controversial poll released in June by the Center for Security Policy, which claimed that many American Muslims support violent jihad to impose sharia law. The center’s founder and president is the prominent Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, who has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate speech in the country, as being “gripped by paranoid fantasies about Muslims destroying the west from within”.

As for specifics, Trump said that US customs and border protection agents would need to question people entering the country about their religion, and deny them entry if they people answered that they are Muslim. Trump said he would make exceptions to the “temporary” ban for leaders of Islamic countries, and said he didn’t believe such a policy would affect America’s diplomatic relationships abroad.

“We love you. We want to work with you,” Trump said, when asked for his message to American Muslims. “We want you to turn in the bad ones.”

Prominent Republicans from across the spectrum have condemned Trump’s proposals. Former US vice-president Dick Cheney said barring Muslims from entering the country “goes against everything we stand for and believe in”, in an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.

Fellow Republican candidates ran the gamut from outright denunciation of the plan to comparisons with their own plans. Retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson told the New York Times that immigrants should be registered and monitored, but not based on their religion. Kentucky senator Rand Paul was more nuanced in his criticism. A spokesperson told the New York Times that Paul’s campaign would “block visitors and immigrants” from countries with “known radical elements”.

Democrats were direct in their condemnation. Former Maryland governor and Democratic presidential candidate Martin O’Malley called Trump a “fascist demagogue”. And Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton called the proposal “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive”.

“This makes us less safe,” the candidate said on Twitter.

Trump’s latest proposal “sounds more like a fascist leader of the 40s than a man who is running to be the leader of a civilized nation like the United States”, said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, in an opinion piece for the Guardian, suggesting a comparison between Trump and Adolf Hitler. Ahwad called on Republicans to condemn Islamophobia, as President Obama did in a rare Sunday evening address from the Oval Office.