Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump has called for the U.S. to adopt racial profiling policies.
“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
Trump has cited Israel as a model for racial profiling.
“You look at Israel and you look at others and they do it and they do it successfully,” said Trump, who has espoused many far-right policies.
Trump's remarks were highlighted by leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
The demagogic Republican presidential candidate has called for a ban on Muslims from entering the U.S. Trump has also proposed barring immigrants from countries with "a proven history of terrorism."
He claimed more overt racial profiling measures would help prevent attacks like the massacre of at least 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida on June 12.
“You know, I hate the concept of profiling. But we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads. We really have to look at profiling. We have to look at is seriously,” Trump said.
In the immediate wake of the attack, Trump deceptively blamed immigration, stressing that the suspected shooter, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim of Afghan descent. Yet Mateen was in fact born in the U.S. His parents were migrants, but he was born in New York.
Mike Huckabee, a hard-line right-wing Republican who has extreme pro-Israel views, also pointed to Israel to justify a prohibition on Muslim migration.
“Right here in Israel, Muslims don’t just get to come into Israel without some clearance," he told an Israeli radio station last week. "In fact, I am not sure that they are allowed to immigrate here at all."
"So it’s not unusual — when everybody acts like ‘Oh what Trump has said is so amazing,’ it’s not that amazing in Israel. You don’t have open borders to Muslims here," added Huckabee, himself a former GOP presidential candidate who has endorsed Trump.
Palestinians are targets of Israeli surveillance and repression, and Palestinian citizens of Israel face discrimination throughout society, as even the U.S. State Department has acknowledged. Israeli human rights group Adalah has documented more than 50 Israeli laws that "directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life."
In 2014, 43 members of an elite Israeli intelligence unit signed a letter saying they would no longer spy on Palestinians. They said the information they gathered was largely used not to protect people, but rather to strengthen Israel's illegal, almost five-decade military occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"We refuse to take part in actions against Palestinians and refuse to continue serving as a tool for deepening military rule in the Occupied Territories," the dozens of Israeli officer wrote.
They revealed that they had been ordered to gather sensitive private information, such as sexual preferences and health problems, which could then be "used to extort people into becoming informants."
"Intelligence allows ongoing control over millions of people, thorough and intrusive monitoring and invasion into most aspects of life," the Israeli spies wrote. "All of this does not allow for normal living, fuels more violence and puts off any end to the conflict."
Segments of the extreme right-wing have cited Israel as a model of the kind of racist, ethnocratic societies they hope to create.
On Oct. 31, white supremacists held a hate conference in Washington, D.C.'s renowned Press Club. Sam Dickson, an extremist attorney who has represented the KKK in court and who advocates for breaking up the U.S. to create an ethno-state for whites and a separate ethno-state for blacks, cited Israel as a model of what he supports.
“The opposition to intermarriage. The creation of their own state. The re-creation of their language. This is the greatest triumph of racial idealism in history," Dickson said. "All we’re asking for is equality. The same right that Jews claim for themselves."
The white supremacist participants, some of whom are linked to neo-Nazi groups, spewed anti-Semitic views, but applauded the nationalist movement of Zionism and the state of Israel as a model for their own racial separatist movement. They also spoke highly of Donald Trump.
In the CBS interview on Sunday, Trump also called for more surveillance of U.S. mosques. As a model for this, he cited the New York Police Department's secretive Muslim spying program, which was shut down in response to federal lawsuits, harsh backlash from civil rights groups and criticism from even the FBI.
Trump also cited France as a model, which has been under a state of emergency, in which civil liberties are suspended, since Nov. 13, when 130 people were killed in Paris in a series of attacks for which ISIS claimed credit.
"If you go to France right now, they're doing it in France. In fact, in some instances they're closing down mosques," Trump said.
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