Donald Trump mural in Jerusalem, Israel. Photo courtesy of Tim Mossholder/Unsplash.
The ongoing presidential campaigns of Ben Carson and Donald Trump for the Republican Party nomination have relied on political mobilization based on explicit xenophobia to an extent that has not been seen in recent years.
Carson, a renowned former surgeon, gained notoriety for his unconstitutional call to prohibit Muslims from running for United States president.
In a similar vein, Donald Trump, real estate developer and reality show host turned politician, has gained an infamous reputation for racist comments. While launching his campaign, he referred to Mexican immigrants as “criminals” and “rapists” who needed to be deported and prevented from coming into the United States. He wishes to do so by building a wall across the US-Mexican border. Since the Paris terrorist attacks in November, he has also directed his hate towards Muslims in the United States, a prominent target of his ire. He has most recently called for a ban on Muslims entering or re-entering the United States. Trump has refused to retract or apologize for any of his comments.
Following the deadly shootings at San Bernardino, California, committed by a married couple that identified as Muslim and was allegedly linked with terrorist organizations in the Middle East, President Barack Obama has called for tolerance and restraint. During an address from the Oval Office, he alluded to the dangers of conflating Muslims and their religion with the acts of a minuscule number of their co-religionists, when he said, “Muslim-Americans are our friends and our neighbors, our co-workers, our sports heroes.”
In response, Donald Trump tweeted “Obama said in his speech that Muslims are our sports heroes. What sport is he talking about, and who? Is Obama profiling?” which like some of his other controversial comments have since been roundly condemned and refuted.
Among those who have criticized Trump for his comments are precisely some of those Muslim sports heroes who he has purposefully ignored and conveniently forgotten in his remarks. This list includes such legends as the former heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali and the pro basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
In response to Trump, Ali said “I am a Muslim, and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know the ruthless violence of so-called Islamic jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.” Similarly, Abdul-Jabbar accused Trump of stoking fears rather than offering actual solutions to the problems of terrorism, adding, “Trump’s irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric and deliberate propagation of misinformation have created a frightened and hostile atmosphere here that could embolden people to violence.”
Other highly eminent Muslim-American sports personalities include the former heavyweight champion boxer Mike Tyson and the former pro basketball stars Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon. In American football, such teams as the Detroit Lions, the Kansas City Chiefs, the New York Jets, the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos currently have Muslim team members. There are several other current and former sports persons in basketball, baseball and boxing who practice Islam in the United States.
Beyond American sports, several of the top athletes in the world are Muslim, most notably in soccer. This includes such well-known, even beloved figures in soccer, as Mesut Ozil and Sami Khedira, who played for Germany and Samir Nasri and Karim Benzema who played for France. All four represented their countries in the FIFA World Cup. Were Trump to impose his travel ban and deport all Muslims from the United States, American fans (potentially also including some of Trump’s supporters) would be deprived from viewing some of their favorite players in a wide variety of sports.
How would Trump make America great by undercutting American sports? By excluding some of the country’s and the world’s best athletes? Further, how would the United States ever qualify for hosting the Olympics, the FIFA world cups and several other international sports competitions?
What is especially surprising (or perhaps not so much) about Trump’s comments is that he has often met and been photographed with several of the most famous Muslim sports personalities, including O’Neal, Ali and Abdul-Jabbar and even tweeted at them before, referring to them as friends of his. However, there is logic to Trump’s madness. By overlooking the vast contribution of Muslim-Americans to the world of sports, Trump aims to further exclude Muslims from the mainstream of American society. He renders Muslims as perpetual “foreigners,” who are beyond the pale of acceptability. This is a category that has included, at different points of time in American history, such groups as the Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese and Japanese, among others.
It is also perhaps no coincidence that many of the most accomplished Muslim athletes in the United States belong to racial minorities. Because of the racialized imagination of Muslims in the United States as “brown” or “black,” Trump’s Islamophobia is ultimately a statement of white supremacy, which has an ugly history since the colonization of North America and the establishment of the United States.
That the fascist Trump is gaining (and not losing) popularity because of his chauvinistic rhetoric is the most recent sign yet that racism is far from over in the contemporary United States. •
