[Content Note: Islamophobia.]
"There seems to be no bottom to the cesspool of Islamophobic rhetoric coming from Republican candidates. The tone of anti-Muslim musings post-Paris attack has become so poisonous that it cannot portend anything positive. ...[T]his is the problem with reckless, racist rhetoric: Each utterance tosses one more log onto the bonfire that can burn out a space for the unimaginable. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. warned in his 1967 'The Other America' speech: 'Racism is evil because its ultimate logic is genocide.' As King put it: 'If one says that I am not good enough to live next door to him; if one says that I am not good enough to eat at a lunch counter, or to have a good, decent job, or to go to school with him merely because of my race, he is saying consciously or unconsciously that I do not deserve to exist.' Whereas these candidates may not be conscious of this 'ultimate logic' or in any way approve of it, it doesn't make their language any less dangerous when it lands on the ears of the minorities on the margins, or those looking for a reason to gussy up their wrongheadedness with righteousness."—Charles M. Blow in his latest for the New York Times, "Anti-Muslim Is Anti-American."
[Related Reading: This Must Stop.]
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