Image Credit: Luis Vazquez/Gulf News


United States President Barack Obama didn’t need to deliver a speech on the Orlando shooting on Tuesday, having already addressed it in solemn voice the day before. But following a meeting with his national security team on the state of the country’s fight against Daesh (the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), he found he had something important to say.

He was haunted by an ugliness in America that’s beginning to rear its head once again. It’s a darkness embodied not just in the horrific attack in Orlando on Sunday, which left 50 dead and 53 wounded, but more by how we as a society respond, and even who we become in its aftermath.

The day after the attack, Donald Trump spoke, not to console us as a country, but to stoke fears and fuel unfounded hatreds. He sought to further terrify the American electorate by casting the act not as aberrant and extreme and the consequence of how readily available weapons of war are to all, but as the logical conclusion of our country’s immigration policy. He called, yet again, for a ban on all Muslim immigration, despite the fact that the shooter was born in the United States, and despite the fact that his motives remain unclear.

“We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer,” Trump said of any Muslim who would come to America. It was a frightening portrait of what America could become under a Trump presidency.

“That’s not the America we want — it doesn’t reflect our Democratic ideals,” the president said on Tuesday of Trump’s anti-Muslim stance. America is at a crossroads in this election, and the choices before us have perhaps never been more stark than they are today. Obama is right to be worried: It’s not just our safety that’s in question, but America’s heart and soul. After all, we’ve seen this before from America. We saw it in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, when Muslims around the country were unfairly victimised and made scapegoats for years. And Americans remembered it when authors like Alia Malek chronicled the stories of how Arab Americans were wronged. She did it so people would remember what not to do, and who not to be, and what doesn’t help a nation recovering from loss.

Temporary ban

But we are seeing it all over again anyway. And with Trump we’ve seen it not just with regard to Muslim Americans, but also in his treatment of women, when he calls us “animals” and treats us as less than human. We’ve seen it in the violence of his rallies and his failure to distance himself from overtures from former KKK (Ku Klux Klan) leaders. And we’ve seen it perhaps most poignantly in the wake of the San Bernardino attack, when he first called for the introduction of a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration.

He seemed to back off that ban when it went over poorly with the GOP establishment, just as he’s sought to have it both ways with regard to his misogynistic statements and embrace of campaign rally violence. But on Monday, the veil fell away. His moment of political opportunity had come, and Trump milked it for all the fear he could squeeze out. He called the terror attack a “strike at the soul of who we are as a nation”. That’s surely true. But as Obama noted, it’s Trump and what he stands for that’s threatening to rot us from the inside out.

“This is a country founded on basic freedoms, including freedom of religion,” Obama said. “And if we ever abandon those values, we would not only make it a lot easier to radicalise people here and around the world, but we have betrayed the very things we are trying to protect, and then the terrorists would have won. We cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”

But his time at the helm is winding down and the question of who we will become as a nation after his presidency has never been more pronounced. Will America go down Trump’s path of bigotry and darkness? Or will America embrace Muslim Americans as the allies they are, mourn the dead and mobilise — not out of fear of what happened, but out of love and strength and determination to keep the great country a beacon? Will we manage to keep our soul?

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Lucia Graves is a Guardian US columnist. She was previously a staff correspondent for National Journal magazine and a staff reporter at Huffington Post.