Bill Clinton in his first 2026 campaign appearance in South Florida yesterday said he is “tired of people denigrating Muslims for being Muslims” and quoted the Koran on Allah creating different peoples so they might “come to know one another.” The issue is not religious identity. Clinton knows it is about an extremist ideology that rejects the secular liberal order and treats Sharia as superior to constitutional democracy. That distinction is not bigotry. It is the same scrutiny applied to any political movement whose doctrine is incompatible with open societies. Clinton’s framing collapses it into a generic plea for tolerance. But voters don’t have to be lectured about it, they have repeatedly elected Muslims without treating their faith as disqualifying. There are about 255 Muslim elected officials nationwide, including four in the House, the mayor of New York, and dozens in state legislatures. During Clinton’s administration, Bin Laden and al-Qaeda grew powerful and attacked America repeatedly: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and Somalia attacks, the 1995 Riyadh bombing and the 1996 Khobar Towers attack, 1998 East African embassy bombings, 1999 Millennium plot, and the 2000 USS Cole attack. He knows first hand the violent interpretation of Islam that is a terror scourge. But for politics, it is all about ‘religion’ and ‘tolerance.’