No To Muslim President: Ben Carson
No to a Muslim president is the response by Republican candidate Dr. Ben Carson when determining who should or should not occupy the highest office of the United States. He pointed out that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.
He was responding to a question on NBC’s Meet the Press broadcasted Sunday morning, September 20, 2015. NBC News quoted the retired neurosurgeon expressing his opinion on the matter.
“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”
When asked if he would vote a Muslim candidate to Congress, Carson said that Congress was a different story and his vote would be determined by who the candidate was and what the aspirant’s policies looked like.
Currently, two Muslims sit in Congress, both of them Democrats. They are Keith Ellison of Minnesota, elected to the House of Representatives in 2007, and André Carson of Indiana, elected in 2008.
Raised a Catholic, U.S. Representative Keith Ellison, 52, turned to Islam at the age of 19, according to the Star Tribune. He was then an undergraduate student at Wayne State University in Detroit.
By 1995, Ellison earned public recognition as a lawyer devoting much of his time to promote the Nation of Islam. In anticipation of the Million Man March organized by Louis Farrakhan, Ellison made an appearance at a University of Minnesota rally with Farrakhan’s second-in-command, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, who routinely denounced Jews as “bloodsuckers” in his speeches.
U.S. Representative André Carson, 41, was attracted to Islam as a teen by Nation of Islam followers walking the streets of his near-northside neighborhood in Indianapolis. Imam Muhammad Siddeeq, a former assistant to Louis Farrakhan, was instrumental in Carson’s conversion to Islam.
Carson was a state alcohol license compliance officer and a member of the Indianapolis/Marion City-County council from 2007 to 2008. The death of his grandmother, United States Representative Julia Carson in 2008, prompted him to go after the seat she’d vacated. As a Democrat, he won the vote by special election to the One Hundred Tenth Congress.
According to Huffington Post, Representative Keith Ellison carried a clock around Capitol Hill on Wednesday in support of the Muslim ninth-grader arrested for bringing to school a homemade clock mistaken for a bomb. No bomb was found to the Muslim youth’s credit, and that got him invited to the White House by President Barack Obama. Liberty News later disputed the youth’s claim of the clock being his invention, by showing it to be the “guts” of an existing clock built by Micronta, a Radio Shack subsidiary. The Observer identified the youth’s father as a “Dallas imam” playing the Quran’s defender in a mock trial staged by Florida Pastor Terry Jones who burned the Muslim holy book in his church. Self-promotion appeared to be the common motive in all instances.
Meanwhile, in a video published by the Huffington Post, Representative André Carson told an Islamic Circle of North America convention that American schools should be modeled after Madrassas, or Islamic schools based on the Quran. Carson’s presentation on May 26, 2012, went online, creating much disagreement, widening the gap between Islamic proselytizing and secular preference.
The compatibility between the Muslim communities pushing for sharia law and the secular governments which tolerate it, has been widely questioned. Quebec in Canada, France, and parts of China are examples of places where sharia advocates have taken a position at loggerheads with secular government. Muslims strictly adhere to their religious practices and giving them secular postings could disrupt the normal flow of a culturally diverse society.
With the Muslim factor causing much divisiveness in secular communities, Islamists in leadership roles could be an awkward proposition. Dr. Ben Carson, for one, is clear with his “no” to having a Muslim president for the United States of America.
[Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images]
