O’Malley calls Trump comments about Muslims ‘outrageous, fascist’

CEDAR RAPIDS - Democratic presidential candidate Martin O'Malley lashed out at Donald Trump's call for a 'complete and total shutdown” of Muslims entering the United States, calling it 'outrageous, fascist” and putting Muslim-Americans at risk.

The former Maryland governor said he felt an obligation as a candidate for president to speak out against Trump's comments that 'play into the hands of ISIS” and in defense of Muslim-Americans who he called the 'front line of defense” against further terrorism.

O'Malley acknowledged that some Americans will agree with Trump because democracy is vulnerable when it is attacked.

In a statement he released Monday, Trump said: 'Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life.”

However, O'Malley warned that that's the kind of speech 'that sometimes precedes fascism.”

O'Malley, who was in Cedar Rapids to participate in the Iowa Presidential Tech Town Hall, called President Barack Obama's Oval Office address to the nation Sunday 'spot on.”

He likened it to President George W. Bush's comments after Sept. 11, 2001, that the United States was not at war with the religion of Islam.

'It was an important message for the whole country,” he said about Obama's comments.

Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina was not complimentary.

'Vintage Obama,” said Fiorina, who also participated in the tech Town Hall at The Hotel at Kirkwood Center. 'No leadership. No strategy. Politics as usual.”

She criticized him for using the address 'to take a swipe at Republicans or to bang away on things that would have made no difference in San Bernardino at all like gun control. Authorization of force in Syria is totally beside the point.

'He would not stand up and admit that his strategy, such as it is, is failing,” Fiorina added.

In her remarks to the town hall, Fiorina expressed anger that the president and his former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton 'do not understand this threat and refuse to call it radical Islamic terrorism.”

Rather than climate change, she called radical Islamic terrorism 'around the world and here at home - both lone wolves and packs of wolves” the most pressing national security threat the nation faces.

'ISIS is an evil that must be confronted. It must be destroyed,” Fiorina said.

l Comments: (319) 398-8375; james.lynch@thegazette.com