Kansas GOP distributing extremely Islamophobic mailer
Republicans stoke fears just weeks after three Kansas men were arrested for plotting a terror attack against Muslims.
The Kansas Republican Party is distributing mailers depicting ISIS fighters and promising to defend the state against threats “from those who support ideologies that are in conflict with the United States Constitution and Kansas values.”
“The first step to keeping Kansas safe is to recognize who the enemy is,” says a mailer distributed by the party behalf of Republican State Rep. Joseph Scapa. “LET’S KEEP TERRORISTS OUT OF KANSAS!”
The mailer is being distributed weeks after three white men were arrested in Garden City, Kansas and charged for allegedly plotting to bomb an apartment complex where many Somali immigrants live and worship. The criminal complaint, citing a confidential source, details how the heavily armed men referred to Somalis as “cockroaches” and women dressed in traditional garb as “fucking raghead bitches.”
“The only good Muslim is a dead Muslim,” one of the suspects said, according to the complaint.
“A positive issue for Republicans”
The Kansas Republican Party justifies its Islamophobic messaging on the basis of focus groups that indicated it’s a winning issue.
“We did polling and focus groups, and the one issue that got overwhelming positive response and was associated with Republicans was safety,” Clay Barker, executive director of the Kansas Republican Party, told the Wichita Eagle. “You know, Gitmo, that article that came out back in August that ISIS had named soldiers for assassinations, police being shot and those knuckleheads in Garden City, it all kind of added up to a security issue… the whole feeling that’s there violence out there. And it’s a positive issue for Republicans.”
Barker told the Eagle that similar mailers are being sent on behalf of other Republican candidates throughout the state.
Robert McCraw, the D.C.-based director of government affairs with the Council on American-Islamic Relations, denounced the mailers. In an interview with the Eagle, he described them as “a shameful example of scare mongering tactics that I hope the Republican Party can learn to move away from.”
It’s appalling for the Kansas GOP “to falsely insinuate that the state’s Muslim population is linked to terror groups like ISIS,” McCraw added. In the wake of the Garden City charges, “this flier verges on incitement of violence to Muslims.”
Elizabeth Bishop, the Democrat running against Rep. Scapa, told the Eagle, “Look at what happened in Garden City… I think [the mailer] feeds into that.”
Islamophobia on the rise
As ThinkProgress has documented, 2016 has seen a rise in Islamophobia in the United States and Europe. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has contributed to the trend by running on a platform that includes a ban on Muslims entering the country, increased surveillance of U.S. mosques, suggesting all Muslims living in the U.S. should be forced to register in a federal database, and open support for racial profiling.
Trump has also called for a political test for immigrants. At a rally in August, he said, “those who do not believe in our Constitution or who support bigotry and hatred will not be admitted for immigration into our country.” The Associated Press reported that the process “would assess a candidate’s stances on issues like religious freedom, gender equality and gay rights” and attempt to ascertain whether “they support American values like tolerance and pluralism,” by relying on interview questionnaires, social media searches, and reference checks.
It’s been an especially harrowing year to be Muslim in America.thinkprogress.org
In an interview with the Eagle, Rep. Scapa, the Kansas Republican whose name is on the mailer, echoed Trump’s rhetoric.
“We have people coming into our state from parts of the world who believe in ideologies that are incompatible with the United States Constitution and our Kansas values and that poses a threat,” Scapa said. “We know for a fact that we cannot vet the people that are coming into our state from other parts of the world… where they believe in ideologies that we don’t.”
The refugees Scapa is alluding to actually go through an extremely rigorous vetting process that can take anywhere from 18 to 24 months. That process is extremely effective. Since the 9/11 attacks, almost 800,000 refugees have entered the country, and none have been arrested for planning terrorist attacks on the United States.
In fact, in the United States, a person is seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than they are to be killed by a Muslim terrorist, according to a study published last year in the New York Times.