Callow professional hectorer Ben Shapiro may be a conservative, but he doesn't like Donald Trump. He's particularly appalled at Trump's new proposal to prevent all Muslims from entering the United States. Shapiro denounces the proposal under the headline "Desperate Trump Drops Ugly Policy Bomb: Ban All the Muslims Abroad," writing:
It’s a rotten idea all the way around: legally, ethically, practically. Trump’s supporters need to realize at some point that knee-jerk extreme reactions to events of the day don’t substitute for good judgment.
Yes, it's shocking that Trump and his fans are having "knee-jerk extreme reactions to events of the day" involving Muslims, according to Shapiro -- who spends his days reacting to daily events involving Muslims like this:
And when Shapiro isn't on Twitter, he's producing thoughtful observations such as "The Myth of the Tiny Radical Muslim Minority":
About which Politifact wrote:
Shapiro said that a majority of Muslims are radicals. To make his numbers work, he had to cherry-pick certain results from public opinion surveys. Given the choice between two possible percentages, he chose the higher one. Shapiro also relied heavily on the idea that anyone who supported sharia law is a radical.
Some of the best polling work shows that Muslim beliefs are much more nuanced. Some countries where high percentages of Muslims support Sharia law show low support for suicide attacks on civilians. Large fractions of Muslims that endorse sharia law do not want it imposed on others. The meaning of Sharia law varies from sect to sect and nation to nation.
Shapiro’s definition of radical is so thin as to be practically meaningless and so too are the numbers he brings to bear.
We rate the claim False.
Shapiro has written that President Obama "proselytizes for Islamic goals and dreams like a member of the faithful" and that Obama and Hillary Clinton "prefer Islam to Christianity." He recently wrote a column titled "No, It Is Not Un-American to Prefer Christian Refugees to Muslim Refugees." When a man shouting about Syria and attacking London commuters with a knife was heckled by an onlooker, who said, "You ain't no Muslim, bruv," Shapiro criticized the onlooker, insisting that the stabber was, in fact, representative of Islam, and adding:
... a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s Muslims believe extreme things, and a wildly disproportionate share engage in horrific acts of violence based on those beliefs. It’s not the job of the West to downplay that....
Donald Trump is clearly an avid consumer of inflammatory right-wing media content. Ben Shapiro is a tireless producer of inflammatory right-wing media content. And now Donald Trump has taken what he's absorbed from that material to what clearly seems, to him, to be its logical conclusion.
Stop looking so shocked, Ben. You and your pals built this.
Crossposted at No More Mr. Nice Blog
