Kenyan Muslims tell Donald Trump and Ben Carson: religious bigotry is wrong
BY JULIE WHITE
A CNN report out of Kenya on Tuesday described how a group of Kenyan Muslims shielded their Christian compatriots from being killed on a bus by Al-Shabaab gunmen.
According to the report filed by AnnieRose Ramos, after ambushing a crowded bus carrying more than 100 mostly female passengers on Monday, the terrorists ordered all the passengers out, and attempted to separate the Christian passengers from the Muslim ones, in an attempt to kill the Christian passengers as they routinely do. According to the report, a passenger named Abdiqafar Teno told CNN that even before the members of the terrorist group approached the bus, some of the Muslim passengers had given the Christian passengers their hijabs (veils) and helped others hide behind bags on the bus. According the same witness, when asked to identify the Christians among them, the majority Muslim passengers said there were no Christians in their midst. “If you want to kill us, then kill us. There are no Christians here,” the witness reportedly said. However, a Christian man who tried to run away was shot by the gunmen.
Kenyan minister of the interior, Joseph Nkaissery, commended the action of the Muslim passengers and told reporters that security forces were in “hot pursuit of the criminals.” He also said: “We are all Kenyans, we are not separated by religion […] We are one people as a nation. And this is a very good message from my brothers and sisters from the Muslim community.”
What a break from the bigotry being stirred in this country by Republican candidates Donald Trump and Ben Carson with the complicity of some of their fellow Republican candidates who are scared to death to criticize them.
Living up to his reputation as a free-wheeling candidate and in contempt for the U.S. Constitution that clearly states that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States,” the retired neurosurgeon said in late September with a straight face:
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”
More recently, Republican front-runner Donald Trump who continuously displayed his eagerness to insult and bully his way to the president, vowed he would bar Muslims from entering the United States temporarily.
I doubt many—if any—of the passengers on the Kenyan bus ambushed by the Kenyan thugs on Monday are more educated than the largely high-school-educated 53% of would-be Republican voters who are said to agree with Ben Carson, Donald Trump and some of the Republican candidates who do so by not condemning their bigotry.
Asked recently to weigh in a discussion as to whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, Carson gave the following, murky answer that says it all: “Let me put it this way, I believe there is only one God. OK?” He then added:
“A lot of people have different impressions and different ideals of who that is, and some people have perhaps distorted the character, but I believe there’s one God.”