Kindergartners Sing of Hope, and Trump Turns Them Over to His Mob

Future terrorists, they shouted. The girls in hijabs were a disgrace. Deport all Muslims. Ban Islam. That was the chorus after the President of the United States shared a 14 second video this week. It showed Somali American kindergarten children in blue graduation gowns and caps celebrating their graduation at a school in St. Paul, Minnesota. They were singing a joyful Somali school song.

Amid the flood of his posts, squeezed between boasts about the economy and patriotic displays for Independence Day, it almost passed unnoticed. But then he shared it again, this time with the caption of an anonymous right wing account: Every girl is wearing a hijab... in kindergarten. That was the entire offense. Children singing, waving to their families, wanting to look like their mothers. Khalid Omar, a community organizer in St. Paul, called it a line that had been crossed. These children were simply celebrating, simply enjoying their day. Anyone attacking them, he said, was acting with cruelty, danger, and inhumanity. James Zogby of the Arab American Institute said Trump was a bigoted bully who targeted the vulnerable, women and immigrants, but going after five year olds was beneath even him.

For more than 1 year, Trump has blanketed Minnesota's Somali community with xenophobic attacks. He has described Somali immigrants as garbage that should go back where they came from. He has portrayed their children as a burden on public schools and mocked Representative Ilhan Omar, referring to her hijab as a little turban. His administration seized on a welfare fraud case involving members of the community to tighten immigration enforcement, threaten federal child care funding, and launch investigations that a court later concluded were intended to harass Democratic officials in the state and retaliate against them.

Monday's posts reached nearly 13 million followers, and what came back from them is the real indictment. They called the children future terrorists and the girls in hijabs a disgrace. They demanded the deportation of all Muslims and the banning of Islam. One account with more than 1 million followers declared that Trump had exposed a terrifying truth, America was being conquered. That is the harvest a president reaps when he points at a child. Organizations that monitor the growing hatred directed at Muslims say these posts are another building block in the normalization of degrading rhetoric that has already contributed to violence and may lead to more.

The White House declined to comment on the posts themselves and instead defended Trump's earlier remarks. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said the administration was right. Foreigners who came to America, hated the country, contributed nothing, and refused to integrate did not belong here, and there was nothing racist about saying so. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison responded that he was no longer surprised, only disgusted.

It is not the first time. As early as April of last year, Trump claimed Minnesota's schools were collapsing under the weight of refugee children, especially those from Somalia. In November, he lamented that a once beautiful community in Minneapolis had disappeared and become unrecognizable. Children, he said, were attending school without speaking a word of English, while teachers cried themselves to sleep. Earlier this year, he shared a racist video portraying Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, then removed it after widespread backlash without apologizing, blaming a staff member instead. This week he also shared an altered image of the Obamas aboard Air Force One, covered with a slogan associated with the Black Lives Matter movement and Arabic script.

Anyone looking for hypocrisy will find it in the structure of this administration itself. Trump has made combating religious discrimination, against Christians and Jews, one of the cornerstones of his second term. This week demonstrates that such protection applies only to selected groups. State Senator Zaynab Mohamed, the youngest woman ever elected to the Minnesota Senate and its first Muslim member, said she did not believe Trump would have shared the video if it had depicted another religion. Imagine children wearing yarmulkes, she said. Everyone would be outraged, and rightly so, because those children are every bit as American as anyone else, as American as the child wearing a school uniform at a Catholic school.

The damage caused by such words can be measured. One survey found that 63 percent of Muslims in the United States have experienced discrimination, while 47 percent of Muslim parents with school aged children said their child had been bullied because of their faith during the past year, roughly twice the national average. Nearly half of those families said the bully had been an adult. The threshold for what people believe they can say about Muslims has fallen dramatically, said the study's research director, Saher Selod. Society still has not fully grasped how degrading that is. Imam Yussuf Abdulle, who oversees more than three dozen Islamic centers, said that after Trump's garbage remark, his own young children asked him, Dad, are we okay? What did we do to him? Does he hate us? Today, he said, he knows the answer. There is no mercy for them in Trump's heart. Yet on that day, he added, those children had captured the hope to which the community in this country still clings. Then he spoke the sentence on which everything depends: What should make people happy if not a kindergarten graduation? Anyone angered by that has no happiness left inside.

Fyodor Dostoevsky placed a thought into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov that every government should be forced to confront. If the entire building of the future could only be erected at the price of a single tortured child's tears, then he would return his ticket to that building. No cause, no people, no nation can outweigh the suffering of a child. One would think that truth is so old and so solid that no one would dare touch it anymore.

What remains is the song those children sang while a man in Washington declared it cause for alarm. It is called I Am a Student, and it speaks of pride, education, and duty toward one's parents:

I am a student, I am a student. I am the flower, the hope of this nation. I strive, I strive, I go to school so that I may repay the debt I owe to my father and my mother. With all the effort I can give, O Allah, help me. Amen, Amen. O Allah, stand beside me. Amen, Amen. I am a student, I am a student, I am the light of the dawn. I run, I run, I go to my examinations so that I may gain knowledge and serve my country. With all the effort I can give, O Allah, help me. Amen, Amen. O Allah, stand beside me. Amen, Amen.

That is what enraged the President. A child who wants to serve his country. Dostoevsky would return the ticket.