Days after Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump couldn’t remember any Muslim athlete, two of America’s most prominent athletes (Muslim or otherwise) condemned Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country.
In a column for TIME magazine published Wednesday, six-time NBA champion Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said Trump has more in common with the Islamic State terror group than America.
“While Trump is not slaughtering innocent people, he is exploiting such acts of violence to create terror here to coerce support,” he wrote. “Trump’s irresponsible, inflammatory rhetoric and deliberate propagation of misinformation have created a frightened and hostile atmosphere that could embolden people to violence. He’s the swaggering guy in old Westerns buying drinks for everyone in the saloon while whipping them up for a lynching.”
Abdul-Jabbar, who converted to Islam in 1968, compared Trump to a “James Bond super-villain” after hearing Trump’s plan to ban Muslims from entering the country. Here’s Abdul-Jabbar’s full piece.
Muhammad Ali, the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world, didn’t mention Trump by name in a statement to NBC News on Wednesday. Rather, he criticized “political leaders” without a clear understanding of Islam.
Here’s Ali’s full-statement to NBC News:
I am a Muslim and there is nothing Islamic about killing innocent people in Paris, San Bernardino, or anywhere else in the world. True Muslims know that the ruthless violence of so called Islamic Jihadists goes against the very tenets of our religion.
We as Muslims have to stand up to those who use Islam to advance their own personal agenda. They have alienated many from learning about Islam. True Muslims know or should know that it goes against our religion to try and force Islam on anybody.
Speaking as someone who has never been accused of political correctness, I believe that our political leaders should use their position to bring understanding about the religion of Islam and clarify that these misguided murderers have perverted people’s views on what Islam really is.
