Trumps Remarks on Pigs Blood Elicits

Challenge From Sister of Chapel Hill

Victim
The New York Times
By LIAM STACK4 hrs ago
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 Jim Wilson/The New York Times Donald J. Trump spoke approvingly about bullets
dipped in pigs blood at a rally on Friday in North Charleston, S.C.
Suzanne Barakat, the sister of a Muslim student killed alongside his wife and sister-in-law
last year in an attack in North Carolina, challenged Donald J. Trump to meet with her after a
speech in which he spoke approvingly of killing Islamic terrorists with bullets dipped in the
blood of pigs.
Ms. Barakat, 28, said the comments and other anti-Muslim rhetoric from Mr. Trump,
including a proposal to ban Muslims from entering the country, have contributed to an
atmosphere of intolerance that she fears could have deadly consequences.
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It allows for the Average Joe to see Muslims the way Craig Hicks saw my brother and his
wife of six weeks and her sister, she said, referring to the man who killed her relatives last
February. As The Other, as subhuman, because of their faith.
Mr. Trump has not responded to Ms. Barakats invitation for a face-to-face meeting, she said.
It was delivered on Saturday via Twitter, a platform the Republican presidential candidate has
frequently used to telegraph his views and to attack people, places and things that he dislikes.
Trump speaks as if he is the authority on American Muslims, said Ms. Barakat. Well, if
you mean it then call me up and meet with me and lets have a chat.

Mr. Trump made his remarks about blood-dipped bullets at a rally on Friday in South
Carolina, before winning the states Republican primary the next day.

Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse Getty Images Suzanne Barakat comforted

her father, Namee Barakat, center, during a funeral service last year. They came during a
speech in which he repeated a questionable story told about Gen. John J. Pershing, an
American Army leader of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. General Pershing, Mr.
Trump said, used bullets dipped in pigs blood to summarily execute dozens of Muslim
prisoners in the Philippines, shortly after the Spanish-American War.
The story, which has circulated online for years, has been dismissed as unsupported by
historical documentation or evidence by websites that fact-check Internet rumors. Mr. Trump
used it to illustrate his call to push back with brutal force against both Islamic terrorism and
political correctness.
This is something you can read in the history books, Mr. Trump told his supporters, adding,
Not a lot of history books, because they dont like teaching it.
According to Mr. Trumps telling, Gen. Pershing brought an end to terrorism after he
captured 50 terrorists and executed 49 of them with blood-soaked bullets. The general told
the sole survivor, You go back to your people and you tell them what happened, Mr.
Trump said.

Gen. Pershing used pigs blood, Mr. Trump said, because Muslims have a whole thing with
swine and animals and pigs, and you know the story they dont like them.
The moral, Mr. Trump said, is, We better start getting tough, and we better start getting
vigilant and using our heads, or were not going to have a country, folks.
Muslim-American groups reacted with horror to the remarks. Nihad Awad, the Executive
Director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said in a statement that Mr. Trump
had crossed the line from spreading hatred to inciting violence in ways that placed MuslimAmericans at risk from rogue vigilantes.
A little more than a year ago, Ms. Barakats brother Deah, 23, was shot and killed at his home
in Chapel Hill, N.C., alongside his wife, Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister, Razan AbuSalha, 19. A neighbor, Craig Stephen Hicks, 46, turned himself in to police later that day.
Mr. Hicks was charged with three counts of murder, and federal authorities are investigating
whether the killings constituted a hate crime. Mr. Hicks wife has said she believes he killed
them over a dispute about parking.
In the year since their deaths Ms. Barakat, a physician in San Francisco, has spoken out
repeatedly about the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment and met with President Obama at a round
table for Muslim-Americans.
Ms. Barakat said Mr. Trumps remarks, delivered not long after the one-year anniversary of
the killings in Chapel Hill, were a moment when I just said, enough is enough.
I want him to tell me to my face that he would ban someone like me if he were to become
president of this country, she said. I want to show him pictures of Deah and Yusor and
Razan and tell him about who they were and what they did. I want him to tell me to my face
that I dont belong here.
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