Liberal Muslim Explains That Trump Offered The Right Path For America
“… liberal honor brigade …”
CNN’s Carol Costello wanted to be sure liberal Muslim Asra Nomani knew exactly how much she should be offended by what President-elect Donald Trump said about Muslims during the presidential campaign.
Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, in turn explained to Costello how much America needs a president who solves problems instead of pandering to political correctness.
Nomani penned an op ed published by the Washington Post in which she explained why she voted for Trump even though she considers herself a liberal Democrat and is at odds with many of his policies.
She was later invited to appear on CNN, where she had to explain her position to Costello, who preferred to focus on Trump’s December 2015 comments about banning Muslims from immigrating until the U.S. could have an effective system to screen out terrorists
“What I know is that we have today a very real and serious threat by extremist Muslims,” she said. “This is a reality that we haven’t confronted directly for the sake of political correctness, and if people would hear out the concerns and fears that others have about the issues to refugees and extremists, I think we could find a path that’s in the middle.”
Nomani said that the barrier to a sane conversation does not come from conservatives.
“Unfortunately, what happens is that this liberal honor brigade shuts down all conversation, calls you ‘bigot’ or ‘racist’ or ‘islamophobe’ if you dare to speak your own concerns,” she told Costello.
“I know that the solution for our world and our country is the middle path, and I believe that the left must move to the middle, the right must move to the middle, then we are going to come up with actually healthy solutions that protect national security as well as human rights,” Nomani said.
In her op ed, Nomani noted that Trump’s call for reviving the economy connected with her.
“I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, ‘HOPE NOW,’ didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration,” she wrote.
However, it was top Democrats’ policies on Islamic terrorism that shaped her decision.
” … as a liberal Muslim who has experienced, first-hand, Islamic extremism in this world, I have been opposed to the decision by President Obama and the Democratic Party to tap dance around the ‘Islam’ in Islamic State,” she said.
She did not profess herself enamored of Trump’s comments.
“Of course, Trump’s rhetoric has been far more than indelicate and folks can have policy differences with his recommendations, but, to me, it has been exaggerated and demonized by the governments of Qatar and Saudi Arabia,” she wrote.
She called the attacks on Trump language “a convenient distraction from the issue that most worries me as a human being on this earth: extremist Islam of the kind that has spilled blood from the hallways of the Taj Mahal hotel in Mumbai to the dance floor of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.”
Then came a WikiLeaks email in which Hillary Clinton herself noted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia “are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to (ISIS) and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”
“The revelations of multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation from Qatar and Saudi Arabia killed my support for Clinton,” she wrote.