Many, many people have been rightly incensed over the past year by Donald Trump's slanders and threats against American Muslims and Muslims more generally. But it's important to think about how we've gotten to the point that a presidential candidate of a major political party was able to denigrate a major religious group and strike a chord with millions of fellow bigots. The context is so obvious as to be almost invisible at this point: the U.S.' deeply flawed, self-defeating response to Islamic terrorism over the last decade and a half. If Americans feel emboldened to express hatred of Muslims, it's in large part because the United States itself has for many years now been engaging in a de facto war against the Muslim world, from our unprovoked and illegal invasion of Iraq to the current regime of drone strikes that exclusively find their targets in Muslim countries. It doesn't matter that the United States officially says we aren't at war with Islam; the repeated message the American public has gotten is that we are indeed at war with Islamic terrorists in multiple countries around the world, and we've got the wars to prove it. How can this not have seeped into the consciousness of millions of Americans, poisoning them against fellow Americans who happen to be Muslim, not to mention Muslims more generally? Religious freedom in our country is becoming yet another piece of collateral damage in a deranged war on terror that has treated a mainly political challenge as a mainly military one.

If you're not questioning the endless, unwinnable war on terror, then excuse me if I don't take you seriously when you act like you care about the rights of American Muslims. The one is the curse of the other.