Ron Ramsey’s singling out of the Muslim faith is about as egregious and mean-spirited as Mr. Wamp’s slam on the unemployed.
Mr. Ramsey, the speaker of the state senate and a GOP gubernatorial candidate, said recently, “you can even argue whether being a Muslim is actually a religion or is a nationality, way of life, or cult, whatever you want to call it.”
He also inveighed against Islam’s holy law, Sharia. And in an exchange with the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, he said that “far too much of Islam has come to resemble a violent political philosophy more than peace-loving religion.
“It’s time for American Muslims who love this country to publicly renounce violent jihadism and to drum those who seek to do America harm out of their faith community,” he declared.
If he had been paying attention, Mr. Ramsey would know that CAIR and other American Islamic leaders, like many elsewhere, have consistently deplored extremist views of jihad, and terrorism. The central question is whether Mr. Ramsey is ignorant of that, or of the fact that the actual number of violent jihadists and terrorists who invoke Islam is nearly an infinitesimal fraction of the billions of Muslims around the world. The violent ones are more akin to the Timothy McVeigh’s of American Christianity than to the views of ordinary, peaceful Muslims.
If he doesn’t know that, he should not be speaking publicly about Islam. We suspect that Mr. Ramsey does know better, and that he is merely flouting Muslims as a political pander, in a gross distortion and a terrible insult to one of the world’s major religions. Mr. Ramsey should focus on the substantive issues of his race for governor, not insult Tennessee’s small minority of Muslims. Such low behavior should automatically disqualify him as someone of gubernatorial timber.
He comes, of course, from a Legislature that sadly is well-known lately for gutter pandering and mean-spirited ignorance, as witnessed by the Tennessee lawmakers who flew to Arizona to support a badly flawed immigration law that would drag-net targets based on their skin color. The political stain on this state is gaining ground.