Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Hillary Clinton Says America Must Protect Itself Without ‘Demonizing’ Muslims

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.

Clinton called for “statesmanship, not partisanship” in the aftermath of the shooting in Orlando while Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, urged the monitoring of mosques in the United States and reiterated his calls for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the country.

Fifty people, including the gunman, the U.S.-born son of Afghan immigrants, died in at the gay nightclub in what was the deadliest shooting in U.S. history.

Clinton, in several television interviews, said she would support stronger measures to prevent so-called lone wolf attacks and urged closer internet monitoring. She said she was committed to protecting the rights of Muslim Americans at the same time.

“We cannot demonize, demagogue and declare war on an entire religion. That is just dangerous,” Clinton said on the MSNBC network.

She also called for steps to prevent people who are on the U.S. no-fly list from purchasing guns and said possible restrictions on assault weapons needed to be part of the debate.

Trump plans to deliver a speech on national security at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) on Monday in New Hampshire. The topic was a change from his earlier plans to criticize Clinton and what he said was her scandal-prone past.

Trump said on CNN that the United States needed better intelligence-gathering to prevent incidents such as the Orlando massacre.

“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.”

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.