Donald Trump Blames Muslims for Not Reporting Orlando Massacre
Image by Getty Images
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.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
