Wisconsin governor, presidential candidate and deep thinker Scott Walker will not be apologizing, exactly, for a recent statement that there are only a “handful” of “reasonable, moderate followers of Islam.” Walker’s campaign told one newspaper everyone is “reading too much” into the comment. Meanwhile, the candidate himself busied himself with an event in Tennesee called “Boots & Jeans, BBQ and Beans” and did not elaborate.
Walker made the “reasonable” comments at a campaign stop at a VFW hall in New Hampshire. He thinks “radical Islam” is bad, unlike President Obummer:
“If you’re fighting a war, you’ve got to identify who the enemy is loud and clear. We’ve said it repeatedly — it’s radical Islamic terrorism,” Walker said. “It is a war against not only America and Israel, it’s a war against Christians, it’s a war against Jews, it’s a war against even the handful of reasonable, moderate followers of Islam who don’t share the radical beliefs that these radical Islamic terrorists have.”
The Council on American Islamic Relations pointed out that Walker sure seems to be saying that the vast majority of Muslims are not moderate or reasonable, and asked the governor for an apology. CAIR’s government affairs manager Robert McCaw said, “These types of inaccurate statements reflect a lack of understanding of Islam and Muslims that is, frankly, not presidential.”
Not presidential maybe, but very much in character for a candidate in a Republican primary: saying something that closely skirts the borders of xenophobia and racism, then receding while your campaign tries half-heartedly to clean it up, but not so much that your voter base won’t know that you meant precisely what you said. Walker spokesperson AshLee Strong said in a statement to the Wisconsin State Journal that Walker totally knows there are other kinds of Muslims or whatever:
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