The world has met the next anti-Christ, and this time it’s not Barrack Obama.

There’s no need for me to write an introduction outlining the inflammatory statements Trump has made that have angered virtually everyone on Earth. If you haven’t heard about them by now, you’re purposefully avoiding..well..all of civilization. The uproar over Trump’s most recent proposal to temporarily ban immigration of Muslims until “our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on” is so loud that it’s simply physically impossible not to have heard about it. You all have a Facebook news feed. You all know what I’m talking about.

But while Trump’s rhetoric is perhaps worthy of criticism, a closer look at the hypocrisy of such criticism by politicians and the American public highlights a fundamental problem with US politics. It also points towards the root cause of terrorism, and helps to explain why we’re staring down the barrel of a possible Trump presidency.

Liberal and Republican politicians have repeatedly bemoaned that Trump’s proposals are “not true to American values”–as if the previous fifteen years of illegal wars, secret drone assassinations, illegal spying, and funding of autocratic regimes and terrorist organizations were as American as apple pie. The irony in Dick Cheney, Lindsay Graham, and John McCain scolding Trump for his “dangerous” remarks is obvious enough. However, the left’s righteous anger towards Trump’s rhetoric is ironic in a much more subtle and telling way. Consider for instance the following events, all of which occurred on December 11, 2015:

First, liberal politicians and bloggers across the globe scorched Trump, complete with photos that made him look like a saluting Nazi, calling his anti-Muslim rhetoric “dangerous” and “un-American.” That very same day, President Obama approved a shipment of $1.3 billion in US weapons to Saudi Arabia. It was also revealed on this day that Saudi Arabia was using the weapons it buys from the US to target schools and innocent civilians in their assault on Yemen.

Exactly how “American” is it to be the leading arms dealer to a country that the State Department has repeatedly classified as one of the world’s “least democratically governed states” with an atrocious human rights record?

To the reader I ask, where is the outrage? Make no mistake, Trumps words are potentially dangerous. But If Americans are truly worried about the safety and well being of peaceful Muslims, the selling of US weapons to countries like Saudi Arabia should be every bit as troubling as Trump’s rhetoric.

(By the way, $1.3 billion sounds like a lot, but it pales in comparison to the $60 billion dollar weapons deal Obama made with Saudi Arabia in 2010, which entered the history books as the largest arms deal in US history. In fact, Barack Obama now holds the record of greatest arms exporter since World War II. )

Most Americans are probably unaware that Saudi Arabia is absolutely tearing apart Yemen at America’s backing. In the summer of 2015, Saudi forces repeatedly used US-manufactured cluster munitions rockets on Yemen neighborhoods, killing hundreds of innocent civilians. Back in 2008, the UN banned the use of cluster munitions because of their high rate of civilian casualties; an agreement that US leadership, with all their love for “American Values”, has not yet ratified. Why? Probably because cluster bombs are the number one seller for US-based Textron Systems Corporation.

As of November, Saudi airstrikes have killed 2,577 and injured 5,239 civilians in Yemen. There are reports that in the first half of 2015 alone, 86% of combat-related deaths in Yemen were civilians. But the Sauds are not just killing people, they’re destroying any hope for future generations by obliterating Yemen’s already poor infrastructure. To date, more than 1,000 schools have either been destroyed, damaged, or are occupied by displaced peoples in Yemen. According to UNICEF, at least 34% of Yemeni children have not returned to school since the conflict escalated in March. Perhaps the US could accept some of these displaced citizens as refugees, but perhaps the US could also stop providing Saudi Arabia with the weapons.

Imagine if, in addition to scolding Trump for his remarks, the American public was equally vocal about the sale of US weapons to the Middle East’s most oppressive regime?

Perhaps most disturbing is that Saudi Arabia is arguably the primary source of the radical Islamic terrorist ideology. To keep control and influence over its populace, the Saudi regime uses the most violent and far right form of Islam known as Wahhabism. But Wahhabism is a double edged sword, and in creating the fanatical zealots that adhere to the Saudi royalty, it often times also creates terrorists and bitter sectarian disputes that claim the lives of thousands of innocent muslims. Perhaps the best example of this is Saudi Arabia’s most recent “Frankenstein Monster:” ISIS. And until our politicians either become willing or are forced by public opinion to face this reality, terrorism and the threat it poses for both innocent Muslims and Americans alike will continue. Or, as the New York Times puts it:

“Daesh [ISIS] has a mother: the invasion of Iraq. But it also has a father: Saudi Arabia and its religious-industrial complex. Until that point is understood, battles may be won, but the war will be lost. Jihadists will be killed, only to be reborn again in future generations and raised on the same books.”

While ISIS adopted its ideology from the Saudi government, it arguably got its fangs through the help of the US. Obama has taken to the practice of arming so-called “moderate rebels” in Syria in an attempt to oust President Bashar al-Assad. This war has been absolutely brutal on the Syrian population. And it shouldn’t even have lasted this long. Had the West, with it’s insatiable appetite for installing dictators that are friendly to Western interests, not armed every person that claimed to be dissatisfied with Assad, this war would have been settled long ago. Instead, the US has prolonged an uprising that would have likely ended years ago into a war that has the potential to last decades. But the US government has decided it’s all worth it.

In other words, Obama is willing to let innocent Muslims die if it means putting the US in a better position. Does this logic sound familiar?

As we all know, the plan to arm Syrian rebels backfired tremendously. Many warned about the risk in arming the Syrian rebels. In 2013, a full year before ISIS would suddenly burst onto the scene, TIMES wrote:

“Obama may want to keep the opposition alive, but it would be dangerous to give them weapons that could be used to take down passenger planes since the rebels are deeply intertwined with jihadist factions, including one, Jabhat al-Nusra, the administration listed as an al Qaeda ally last December.”

As we all know, over the next year ISIS would spawn from al-Nusra. We now have a situation where ISIS (a group that is financially backed by rich Saudi Arabian businessmen) is using US weapons to kill tens of thousands of innocent muslims. Again, if Americans are truly worried about the safety of Muslims, Obama’s approach to the Syrian civil war should cause no less outrage than Trump’s statements.

And it’s not just the indirect actions of Obama that have harmed muslims (and subsequently gone unnoticed by the American public). US drone assassinations in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia have killed thousands of innocent civilians. While drone strikes and anti-war protests began during the Bush administration, only one of those two has continued under the Obama administration. As the left has sat in obedient silence over the past 8 years, drone strikes have increased significantly under Obama. Since 2002, as many as 872 strikes have been conducted in the aforementioned countries, a large majority of them under Obama’s direct approval.

To date, drones have killed between 3,492 and 5,545 citizens. There are reports that as many as 90% of the people killed in Obama’s drone strikes weren’t even the intended targets. Even worse, the exact number of innocents killed remains unclear, as documents have shown that the Obama administration masks the number by categorizing unidentified persons as enemies.

Think about that last sentence. This means that while Obama hasn’t directly stated that all Muslims are dangerous, the policy that “all unidentified targets are considered enemies” is indiscernible in practice.

In September of 2015, media outlets, Facebook, and Twitter erupted when Ben Carson said he wouldn’t vote for a Muslim to be president. Many called his words “dangerous” to muslims. Liberals felt good about themselves. Muslims were saved from the tyranny of the right. The White House even released a statement condemning Carson’s words as “entirely inconsistent with American values.”

This is the same White House that…well…by now you get the picture.

This begs the question, if Carson’s words were dangerous to innocent Muslims, surely the dropping of bombs on innocent Muslims heads would result in an infinitely larger reaction from the American public, right? Unfortunately, no. Instead, the American public is mute on this issue. Opting instead to photoshop sex toys into the hands of republican candidates (obviously that link is NSFW). As the whistle blower that revealed the extent of Obama’s drone warfare puts it:

“We’re allowing this to happen. And by “we” I mean every American citizen who has access to this information but continues to do nothing about it.”

Make no mistake, this post is not an endorsement of Trump. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the American public. I’m sure there’s a surge of pride that many get when they post a scathing status update about Trump. I’m sure they feel like they’ve protected Muslims somehow. But to a Muslim family whose house was just destroyed by a bomb with the words “MADE IN USA” inscribed on it, do you think they view you as their protector because you scolded Trump for something he said but didn’t speak up when you learned that your government was killing innocent people?

The truth is, this should make every single one of us feel bad. We’re allowing the murder of Middle Eastern civilians at the hands of our government. As a friend of mine once lamented,

“there was once a time not so long ago when public opposition to this kind of war mongering could shut down college campuses, distrupt major party conventions, make international headlines, and threaten the very practice of US public diplomacy. But that was during the Bush years.”

Since then, college-aged progressives have shifted their attention from war crimes to halloween costumes, the protection of “safe spaces,” and ensuring that faculty understand that colleges are “not about creating an intellectual space!”

The failure to stand together in opposition not just to Obama’s continued war-mongering in the Middle East, but to ALL politicians that espouse such myopic views, is exactly why all of us is responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. We already know the fault of the neconservative right in this situation. There was no shortage of protestation against their warmongering. But for years, the progressive left has sat in silence while Obama continued the neoconservative approach to the Middle East. Party leaders didn’t tell us to be upset about it, so naturally, we didn’t speak up. And in the absence of any real public demand for our politicians to change their approach, the situation deteriorated to the point that we could no longer ignore it. And by then, it had taken on a much more complicated and dangerous form.

The flow of refugees into America threatened to become a crisis. The danger posed by radicalized terrorists became real with the attacks in Paris and San Bernadino. And in the absence of anyone’s willingness to address the root cause of the problem, and seemingly out of all other options, voters have been left with only Trump’s proposals. By allowing our leaders to destabilize the Middle East, we have thrust both a refugee crisis and an increased threat of terrorism upon ourselves. In this environment, the fascist views of Trump have become palatable to a frightened public.

In short, we are left with Trump, as well as the problem of the Middle East, because of our refusal to demand anything better from our current leaders. Consider for example, the likely opponent to the republican candidate in the general election. Should Hillary win the democratic nomination, we will have a situation in which democrats decry the dangerous islamophobic words of Trump while actively supporting a candidate who’s foreign policy is as hawkish as John McCain’s. And if you think Hillary is about to do anything about Saudi Arabia, think again. Saudi Arabians were the third largest foreign donor group to her charity foundation between 1999 and 2014.

Even as I write this, evangelical Christians have pushed Cruz to the top of the polls. Christians. People who worship the dude that literally said “But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also” are voting for a man that said he wants to “carpet bomb” the Middle East until the “sand glows in the dark.”

So when people like Hillary Clinton, Kasich, etc. claim that Trump’s policies are dangerous to Muslims (and Americans) but then turn around and espouse policies that literally kill thousands of Muslims and put the US at greater risk for terrorist attacks, I can’t help but scoff.

When people post snarky statuses about how loony they think trump is, but don’t say a word about our president arming one of the looniest governments in the world in Saudi Arabia, I have trouble taking them seriously.

Look, I’m not here to tell you who to vote for. Truthfully, aside from Rand Paul, nobody in this race, neither republican nor democrat, is actually addressing the root cause of Middle East turmoil. If Rand isn’t your guy, that’s fine. Vote for your favorite candidate. But regardless of who wins the presidency, we Americans need to make it clear that we are just as worried about the current US foreign policy as we are Trump’s words.

Until we stand in unison and consistently and vocally demand a change in the government’s approach to the Middle East, we will continue to put innocent Muslims in harms way. Our hypocritical calls for banishing Islamophobic statements will fall deaf on the ears of innocent Middle Easterners, still ringing from the blasts of bombs that were made in America. Our situation will continue to thrust us in harms way as terrorists continue to threaten our safety.

And least surprisingly, we’ll continue to get the politicians we deserve.