On Tuesday, Republican primary voters in Michigan gave a double-digit victory to a congressional candidate who had dropped out of the race, choosing him over Amir Hassan, a President Donald Trump-backed former Muslim with an identifiably Arabic name.
On Wednesday, some people attending a Trump speech in Las Vegas booed the mention of another Arabic-sounding name before GOP Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo urged them to stop. Austin Abdelnabi was a police officer recently killed in the line of duty, and his brother once worked at the White House.
Either of these episodes could be dismissed as coincidences — as one-offs that say little about much of anything.
But it would seem little coincidence that they happened as Republicans this week launched an overtly Islamophobic campaign against the new Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed.
Trump has toyed with and even employed Islamophobia for political purposes over the past 20 years. His “birther” campaign against Barack Obama, which implied that Obama might be a secret Muslim, helped launch Trump’s political career.
