Donald Trump

Press TV
December 24, 2017

The administration of US President Donald Trump has been trying to blame all of America’s problems on Muslims to create a distraction from his own policies, which favor the rich, argues an American scholar in Madison, Wisconsin.

Dr. Kevin Barrett made the remarks after reports emerged that the new US Ambassador to the Netherlands Peter Hoekstra apologized for denying his anti-Islamic remarks in a 2015 interview, where he suggested that Holland was in chaos because of Muslims.

“Essentially these people are trying to blame all of the world’s problems and specially the problems of the American working class on Muslims and Mexicans and whoever else is a convenient scapegoat,” he told Press TV on Sunday.

The scapegoats in turn provide Trump and his team with the cover they need to keep “robbing his base” hand more money to the rich without making too much noise, he added.

Speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend that year, the onetime lawmaker from Michigan referred to refugees as “invaders” and suggested that Muslim militants were burning cars and no-go zones across the Netherlands.

“There are cars being burned. There are politicians that are being burned … and yes, there are no-go zones in the Netherlands,” Hoekstra said at the panel, which was titled “Muslim Migration Into Europe: Eurabia Come True?”

Earlier this month, when asked by a Dutch news program called “Nieuswsuur” to clarify his comments, Hoekstra denied the remarks altogether and dismissed them as “fake news.”

However, when the station confronted him by playing a video of him making the exact comments at the panel, Hoekstra backpedaled and denied referring to the question as fake news.

“I didn’t call that ‘fake news.’ I didn’t use the words today,” he told the program. “No, I don’t think I did.”

The analyst said Muslims were part of the American society and the only organizations like the FBI had problems with them and used them as an excuse for their policies.

“We have essentially no real problems with Muslims alone for some false flags, we have 9/11 which of course was a false flag and spin-offs from that,” he argued.

“This Islamophobia has gotten so out of hands now that they say these crazy things and then the guy gets later appointed to an important position… an then suddenly he has to make up a bunch of lying denials,” he further argued.