An Open Letter to Donald Trump

An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Millions of Americans shudder every time you open your mouth in fear of yet another hate-filled and dehumanizing remark about Muslims. Your words are reminiscent of those used to justify the mass murder of 13 million innocents, including six million Jews as well as ethnic Poles and other Slavs, communists, LGBT individuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and persons with disabilities. Your recent call to bar all Muslims from entering America, "for the time being," would violate the United States Constitution and international humanitarian law. Beyond being morally reprehensible, barring Muslims from entering the United States would be impossible to implement and profoundly detrimental to U.S. national security interests.

First of all, how would you determine who is a Muslim? How far back would you want to go to identify such individuals — one, two, three generations? What about mixed marriages and the children of such unions? Would the "Muslim Blood" always prevail? What about non-Muslim spouses? What about non-practicing Muslims? Those with Muslim-sounding names who practice other faiths, and those with names that are not easily recognizable as Muslim?

Second, even if it were possible to determine who is a Muslim, would you want to prevent Muslim Americans traveling abroad from re-entering their own country? How about those returning from overseas military duty, or representing the United States as elected officials, diplomats, educators, researchers, humanitarian aid workers, scientists and business leaders? And where would you want to send them, "for the time being", or isn’t that your problem?

Muslim Americans – whether born in the United States or naturalized citizens -- who travel to represent their country elsewhere, especially in the Middle East and North Africa, offer some of the most powerful testimonials to America’s greatness as a land of freedom and opportunity. Foreigners are often amazed that naturalized citizens can be assigned such great responsibilities that reflect the country’s trust in them, which contradicts the propaganda, rumors and falsehoods that often underlie anti-American sentiment abroad. Would you also want to take the further step of deporting Muslims? Would you start the process by forcing them to wear identifiers, yellow crescents perhaps, a reminder of the yellow star that European Jews were forced to wear in countries under German occupation? Or would you prefer, at least initially, to erect detention camps for the relocation of Muslims living in America, with total disregard to citizenship, service, or civil liberties, the very foundations upon which this Nation was built? History remembers the relocation of Japanese-Americans into detention camps during World War II as one of the most flagrant violations of civil liberties in American history. And would you desire to replicate the events of the 1950s McCarthy era—making unsubstantiated accusations of treason without proper regard for evidence? Communists were McCarthy’s target population. Would yours be Muslims and their supporters? Would there be blacklists that make it impossible for them to get jobs and make a living?

Do you believe that having millions of Muslim Americans living in fear, in hiding, in exile, in detention camps, or otherwise unable to work and support themselves and their families, unable to exercise their basic civil liberties and denied their human dignity, would make America safer?

We do understand your fear of terrorism, a fear we all share. But you must realize that our founding principles — that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that
among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — and our first amendment rights protecting the freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly, are the only things that can truly protect us over the long run.