Muslim group executive scolds Donald Trump over ‘Islam hates us’

Presidential hopeful Donald Trump recently told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that Islam hates America. He left his bold statement open-ended, refusing to clarify if all Muslims hate America, or if radical elements are giving many a bad impression.

I think Islam hates us. There’s something there &#8212 there’s a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us…We can’t allow people coming into this country that have this hatred…It’s radical, but it’s very hard to define. It’s very hard to separate because you don’t know who is who.

Now, a Muslim man in Washington state is standing up to Trump’s statement.

“My first reaction was that hate speech results in hate crimes,” Arsalan Bukhari told KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz.

Bukhari is the executive director of the Washington chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Unlike Trump did with his statement, Bukhari clarified his, saying that Trump’s comment did not constitute legal hate speech, but rather, such statements are irresponsible and have consequences.

“It’s based in hate. It promotes ideas that are false,” he said. “It promotes division instead of unification. We need a candidate who is going to unify our country during hard times. We need someone who will tell our nation what plan they have to get us on the right track in terms of the economy, and what they are going to do for our children and their education. That’s the kind of leader we need, versus this sort of divisive talk.”

Bukhari said that Trump’s statement doesn’t take into account the 10-20,000 American Muslims serving in the armed forces, or the nearly 50,000 Muslim doctors working in the United States.

“I can’t read his mind. I can’t say what he was thinking,” Bukhari said. “All I can speak about is the effect of his words.”

The effect of such statements, he argued, is that 2015 holds an all-time record high for hate crimes against Muslims reported in the United States. Bukhari said that the offices of CAIR received, on average, one call a day reporting a hate crime &#8212 30 locally in Washington.

“Dozens of mosques were burned. Dozens of people were attacked or beaten, severely,” he said. “Many people were shot because they were either Muslim or perceived as Muslim. Many Sikh Americans, Latino Americans who were Christians, Hindu Americans, African American Christian men such as one in downtown Seattle, were attacked and beaten.”

“And they were called the same slurs that we see in headlines and are said by politicians,” he said.