Donald Trump Discovers Muslims

You have to hand it to President Trump. To have gone from his call for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” to “this is a not a battle between different faiths” in less than 18 months is an achievement. In others, it might be considered a radical ideological shift on the sources of terrorism. But not in Trump, who does not really think much about anything.

Of course, Trump timed his discovery that “more than 95 percent of the victims of terrorism are themselves Muslim” to coincide with his stay in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s holiest sites and to an immense thirst for weapons from “great American defense companies.” Still, I feel obliged to give the president credit. He has walked back the anti-Muslim rhetoric of his campaign and seems to have discovered something called the Palestinians. It has dawned on him that President Bashar al-Assad of Syria has “committed unspeakable crimes.”

This is a good thing. It is progress.

I wish I could find more to praise in the surreal exercise that was Donald in Arabia. How fitting that the president chose as his first overseas port of call an autocratic sword-brandishing monarchy that demeans women. He brandished. He addressed men. He slotted in.

As Trump lambasted terrorism, without pondering its sources, he was standing in the country that provided 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 and has been the fountainhead — through its religious establishment and consistent funding — of the fanatical, anti-Western, anti-women and puritanical strain of Sunni Islam central to the credo of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

The Saudi embrace of Wahhabi beliefs and its implacable opposition to the pluralistic push that inspired the Arab Spring help explain the recent history of the Middle East. The post-9/11 world has been less a story of Shia Iran against the West than Wahhabi Salafists; it’s not even close. All of this the president chose to forget as he jettisoned President Barack Obama’s attempt to wean American interests from the House of Saud.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/23/opinion/donald-trump-middle-east-saudi-arabia-muslims.html?_r=0