Giuliani Campaign Co-Chair: "I Don't Subscribe To The Principle That There Are Good Muslims And Bad Muslims"

Posted by Jill Filipovic, Feministe at 5:20 AM on January 2, 2008.

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I'm very consciously about to break Godwin's Law here, but I think it's warranted: The rhetoric coming from the Republican party is so hateful that I nearly expect to hear someone propose a final solution to "the Muslim problem."

John Deady, the co-chair of New Hampshire Veterans for Rudy, is standing by the comments he made in the controversial interview with The Guardian we posted on below, in which he said that "the Muslims" need to be chased "back to their caves."

In an interview with me, Deady confirmed that when he made the comments, he was referring to all Muslims.

"I don't subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims," Deady told me by phone from his home in New Hampshire. "They're all Muslims."

But he was probably just taken out of context, right? Well...

In the earlier interview with The Guardian, Deady said of Muslims: "We need to keep the feet to the fire and keep pressing these people until we defeat or chase them back to their caves or in other words get rid of them."

Emphasis mine. Deady later clarified:

"When I say get rid of them, I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide. What I was referring to is, stand up to them every time they stick up their heads and attack us. We can't afford to say, `We'll try diplomacy.' They don't respond to it. If you look into Islamic tradition, a treaty is only good for five years. We're not dealing with a rational mindset here. We're dealing with madmen."

"I wasn't necessarily referring to genocide?" That may be more telling than the original comment.

Ali has more on the GOP's Muslim problem. I'm still in shock that I live in a country where these kinds of comments are acceptable in a Presidential campaign.

Tagged as: republicans, muslims, giuliani, deady

Jill Filipovic is a New York-based freelance writer and a law student at NYU. More of her writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.