Ben Carson Refuses to Back Down, Spouts Even Worse Anti-Muslim Bigotry
Ben Carson, in tried and true right wing fashion, isn’t backing down on his bigoted statements about Muslims. In fact, today he not only doubled down, he got even worse.
Carson explicitly advocated a religious test for public office, saying whoever is elected president should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Koran.” And then he proceeded to recite one of the looniest of the loony right wing anti-Muslim memes — the idea that Muslims can never be trusted because they practice “taqqiyah,” or deliberate dishonesty to trick decent God-fearing American patriots like Ben Carson, so they can take over America by stealth jihad and put all our womenfolk in burqas. Sickening.
This is straight out of the Pamela Geller-Robert Spencer-Frank Gaffney axis of hate speech. Ben Carson’s apparently been reading the garbage propaganda circulated by the so-called “counter-jihad” nutcases.
Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson is standing by his view that a Muslim should not be president of the United States, telling The Hill in an interview on Sunday that whoever takes the White House should be “sworn in on a stack of Bibles, not a Koran.”
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In an interview with The Hill, Carson opened up about why he believes a Muslim would be unfit to serve as commander in chief.
“I do not believe Sharia is consistent with the Constitution of this country,” Carson said, referencing the Islamic law derived from the Koran and traditions of Islam. “Muslims feel that their religion is very much a part of your public life and what you do as a public official, and that’s inconsistent with our principles and our Constitution.”
Carson said that the only exception he’d make would be if the Muslim running for office “publicly rejected all the tenants of Sharia and lived a life consistent with that.”
“Then I wouldn’t have any problem,” he said.
However, on several occasions Carson mentioned “Taqiyya,” a practice in the Shia Islam denomination in which a Muslim can mislead nonbelievers about the nature of their faith to avoid religious persecution.
“Taqiyya is a component of Shia that allows, and even encourages you to lie to achieve your goals,” Carson said.
It’s just infuriating to see this discredited, blatantly bigoted nonsense being touted by a presidential candidate in 2015. America has a problem, all right — but it isn’t “Muslims,” it’s anti-Muslim hate speech.