But where was Hillary?
The Islamic call to prayer sounded suddenly over the loudspeakers, startling reporters still filing into the small mosque just off New Jersey Avenue in Washington, D.C. Shoes, segregated by gender, lined the shelves just inside the entrance as sock-clad feet shuffled across a dark carpet. Female journalists in borrowed headscarves leaned beneath framed tapestries with sparkling Arabic calligraphy, some nervously adjusting their hair.
Underdog Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was ostensibly on his way to the Masjid Muhammad — “The Nation’s Mosque” — on Wednesday for an interfaith dialogue with Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faith leaders. But before the Vermont senator even opened his mouth, everyone already knew the real reason for his visit: Donald Trump.
“We are coming together at a very, very important moment in American history. There is enormous anxiety and fear in this country,” Sanders said. “Do we come together, or do we allow demagogues to divide us up? That is the question of the moment.”
It was a pointed reference to the Republican front-runner, who in the face of Islamic terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., called for a blanket travel ban on all Muslims entering the United States. But it wasn’t the last one.
“Unbelievably, in defiance of the basic tenets of our Constitution, there are some who are even talking about shutting down mosques like the one we are in,” Sanders thundered. “Since Trump’s incendiary comments, we have seen in this country, shamefully, an increase in hate speech and attacks on the Muslim-American community.”
Democratic presidential candidates are increasingly singling out Trump’s rhetoric, calling it the ugly face of a broader movement in the Republican party.
Democratic presidential candidates are increasingly singling out Trump’s rhetoric, calling it the ugly face of a broader movement in the Republican party. “Many GOP candidates have also said extreme things about Muslims,” front-runner Hillary Clinton wrote in a statement last week. “Their language may be more veiled than Mr. Trump’s, but their ideas aren’t so different.” Clinton and Sanders both used Trump’s plan to fundraise for their own presidential campaigns. Former Maryland governor and presidential rival Martin O’Malley visited a northern Virginia mosque just last Friday, where he denounced Trump as a “hate preacher.”
Sanders mosque visit is the latest example of how Trump now dominates the Democratic campaign almost as thoroughly as he does the Republican one. But though Trump’s anti-Islamic antics are causing P.R. and fundraising headaches for Republican candidates, the GOP establishment’s loss is looking more and more like the Democratic establishment’s gain.
#share#Sanders and most of his co-panelists framed the Trump phenomenon as part of a broader American struggle against racism and discrimination. “Let’s not forget about the fact that in our own country — from its very inception, from the very beginning — we saw horrendous pain and suffering inflicted upon Native Americans, upon African Americans,” he said, before ticking off a slew of other aggrieved groups.
It was a sentiment shared by other mosque attendees. “We have to understand that America was founded on white supremacy — right?” mosque member and Sanders supporter Mujahid Beyah tells National Review. “And white supremacy is an ideology and way of life. And it’s also a social pathology.”
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“Trump is playing into that,” Beyah says. “It’s not new.”
Sanders, who is Jewish, was invited to the mosque by Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat and Muslim who has already endorsed the Vermont senator’s insurgent campaign. But Imam Talib Shareef explained that neither he nor his flock is in the tank for any candidate, Democrat or Republican.
#related#“This is not an endorsement,” Shareef says. “We’re all still looking. I’m undecided. But we certainly welcome a voice of consciousness and like-mindedness.”
Now that Sanders and O’Malley have both visited mosques, where does that leave Clinton? Will the Democratic race’s increasing fixation with Trump force the Democratic front-runner to don a headscarf and proclaim solidarity with Muslim Americans?
“It is a good thing to go into a house of worship, to sit with the people there — particularly if they are a persecuted religious minority,” says Ellison. “And to refuse to do so, for fear that you might somehow get some taint — that’s an act of cowardice.”