✣ Trump criticised over Muslim moratorium
What happened? An American archbishop spoke out against presidential hopeful Donald Trump this week after the Republican candidate said he would impose a moratorium on Muslims entering America. Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit said the idea “fractures the very foundation of morality on which we stand”. The archbishop denounced Trump in a letter to his priests last week, saying: “We need to remember that religious rights are a cornerstone of [our] values.” What the media are saying The British media hit upon a rare consensus in its criticism of Trump. At PMQs David Cameron described his comments as “divisive, stupid and wrong”. There was wide coverage of a response by Malala Yousafzai, Nobel prize winner and girls’ education advocate, who condemned the comments as tragic, “full of hatred, full of this ideology of being discriminative towards others”. Half a million people also signed a petition calling for Trump to be banned from entering Britain on the grounds of hate speech. And UK leader Nigel Farage said his Trump’s comments were “massively over the top”. Yet a poll by Sky News found that one in three Britons would support a temporary ban on Muslims entering the UK. What the vaticanisti are saying ‘Is donald trump a fascist?” asked Catholic journalist Ross Douthat in the New York Times. Aside from his comments about Muslims, Douthat said there were other examples of his alleged intolerance: “His bravado and performative machismo (complete with mockery of the weak, unattractive and disabled), his obsession with how we get ‘beat’ by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican ‘rapists’ and other immigrant threats.” But Douthat warned: “Freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far ... The best way to stop a proto-fascist [is] to make sure that he never has a point.”
