White Supremacy Is A Bigger Threat to America than Muslim Foreigners
By: Udochi Esomonu/Arab America Contributing Writer
As a candidate, President Trump promised to instill the sentiment of “America First,” which included the molding of America’s political agenda to solely cater to and preserve the most fundamental sentiments of America’s identity. This policy has led to an increase in nationalistic values and very staunch non-interventionalist foreign policy tactics.
The “America First” policy has been the driving factor in President Trump’s immigration policy thus far as he has imposed a “zero tolerance” policy. This policy focuses on increasing the security of America’s borders to prevent the entrance of illegal immigrants. He has also imposed a series of legislation calling for the banning of residents from various Muslim-populous countries–some of them including Syria, Lybia, and Yemen–in hopes of enacting the fight against terrorism.
When President Trump signed his first Muslim travel ban executive order, which banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, his rationale was to protect the security of American citizens. The legislation itself, since its inception, has gone through various alterations. On Tuesday, June 26, 2018, the Supreme Court upheld the third official version of President Trump’s Muslim travel ban in a 5-4 ruling.
The Supreme Court has ruled to legally allow President Trump’s Muslim travel ban to persist. “This is not about religion–this is about terror and keeping our country safe,” President Trump explained in January 2017 at the inception of the legislation.
If the legislation has been crafted to fight terror, then the true threat of terror in the United States must be addressed: White Supremacy. The world, specifically the United States, is looking to eradicate radical Islamic terrorism, but what they seem to overlook is terrorism in their own homes.
White supremacists are a bigger domestic threat to the United States than the Muslim foreigners or as we label them, the “radical Islamic terrorists” that President Trump has been working endlessly to ban.
According to the Oxford Dictionary, terrorism is defined as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.”
White supremacy is an extremist racial ideology that works to advance the belief that the white race is superior to other races, therefore declaring the national dominance of their race compared to other races. The actions, made in the name of the white supremacist ideology, are not only to suppress people of the non-white races but to strengthen and exert their power to advance themselves in society.
Studies, specifically that of The Investigative Fund, echo the pattern and the statistic that 1% of U.S. domestic terror perpetrators came from one of the countries banned under Trump’s executive order (Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen). President Trump has failed to account for the threat that radical American right-wing violence plays in the undermining of American security.
The mere sight of an Arab or a Muslim creates concern or fear, but the sight of white supremacy fails to elicit national uproar and fear. Many continue to fear ISIS and other known terrorist groups and organizations but are blind to the real threat that white supremacists and those who utilize such an ideology pose in our country and our world today.
To implement their beliefs, white supremacists utilize violence to instill fear in order to promote their ideological agenda. This is the literal definition of terrorism. White Supremacists are a domestic terrorist group, but yet again, many individuals and news outlets have failed to label it for what it truly is: a terrorist group.
Organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, rallies, demonstrations, and riots that have been formed in the name of white supremacist sentiments have occurred throughout American history. The United States continuously fears ideological extremist groups in the Middle East like that of ISIS and Al Qaeda, but literally fails to acknowledge and condemn the domestic extremist racial terrorist group that has plagued our country for decades: believers of the white supremacy ideology.
As a nation, we need to open our eyes to understand what is actually happening and who the actual threats are, as opposed to just reaching solutions and conclusions on the basis of generalizations. It is up to us to change the rhetoric in which we choose to think and speak. Changing this rhetoric only comes through truth, and to reach the truth we must ask ourselves this one question: who is actually more detrimental to America’s domestic safety: white supremacists or the many Arabs and Muslims who we continue to refer to as “radical Islamic terrorists”?
