Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Donald Trump Blames Muslims for Not Reporting Orlando Massacre

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump faulted the Muslim community on Monday for not reporting people like the man who carried out the Orlando gay nightclub attack, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others.

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, speaking on Monday, after the massacre in a Florida nightclub, said the United States must find a way to keep the country safe without demonizing Muslim Americans.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, told CNN he thought Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen was known to people in the Muslim community as someone with a potential for violence.

“You will find that many people that knew him felt that he was a whack job … (that) something like this would have happened,” Trump told CNN in a phone interview. “People that knew him, the ex-wife, other people. They don’t report them. For some reason the Muslim community does not report people like this.”

Trump said the United States needed better intelligence-gathering to prevent such things from happening.

“We have to look at the mosques … and we have to look at the community,” he said. “And believe me, the community knows the people that have the potential to blow up.”

Clinton told MSNBC in an interview that she would support stronger measures to prevent so-called lone wolf attacks and urged closer Internet monitoring, but said she was committed to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans at the same time.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.