She pops up like clockwork whenever there’s a townhall.   Wearing a hijab and a doleful expression, the Muslim woman asks plaintively what the candidate intends to do about “Islamophobia.”  She will mention that she’s one of over 3 million Muslims in the U.S., and may claim that she’s frightened to go out in public.

When the question came to Donald Trump during the debate, he conceded, “You’re right about Islamophobia, and that’s a shame.”  Then he pivoted, a little awkwardly, to the issue of Muslims not reporting what they’d seen in the home of the jihadist couple in San Bernardino, and went on to mention Orlando, Paris, and the World Trade Center.  He then attacked Obama and Clinton for not being able to say the word “radical Islamic terror.”

That’s a big improvement on what Hillary said, naturally, but there’s a better answer. 

It’s really up to Muslims.  If they’re concerned about Islamophobia, they need to call off the jihad.  They need to stop killing and persecuting non-Muslims.  It won’t be easy, because they’ve been doing it for 1500 years.  But that’s the solution.

Islam is a religion of conquest.  The jihad is a fundamental tenet of the faith.  Mohammed conquered most of the Arabian Peninsula, and the armies of his successors swept into the then-Christian Middle East, across North Africa, and through Spain.  After the killing, pillaging, raping, and arson, the fields of Egypt and Sicily, the granaries of Europe, were overrun by the flocks of the conquerors, Muslim pirates infested the Mediterranean, and the jizya, the Islamic tax, was imposed.  The European economy was devastated and the Dark Ages commenced.

Beginning in the 14^th century, the new Turkish Caliphate conquered the Balkans, twice reaching the gates of Vienna.  After the slaughter, the occupied territory stagnated culturally and economically.  When the subject peoples began rebelling in the 19^th century, the independence movements were put down with a brutality unmatched by the West.

Worse was the conquest of India, commencing in the 11^th century.  The Hindus were not dhimmis, People of the Book, and they were massacred with reckless abandon and their cities leveled.  (When they realized how many Hindus there were, the Umayyad rulers nominally granted them this status, but with no effect on the behavior of the conquerors.)  “The Mohammedean conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history,” wrote Will Durant, before the era of political correctness.  About 2 million Hindus may have been killed during the first wave of invasions, and as many as 80 million during the subsequent five centuries.

Western technology granted the world a respite.

Then, in the 20^th century, the jihad resumed.  Muslim fundamentalists did not challenge Western armies, but targeted civilians.  Not a week goes by that Christians and other infidels aren’t killed by Mohammed’s followers, citing passages from the Qur’an.  And there are daily atrocities in the fighting between Shi’ites and Sunnis.

The Muslim woman in the hijab should be told, stop the murder of non-Muslims by Muslims for two months and “Islamophobia” will begin to fade.  Stop it for a couple of years, and it will be only a bad memory.

It would also make a good impression if Shi’ites and Sunnis ceased blowing each other up.

Candidates should respond to the question with questions of their own.

Ask the Muslim woman when we can count on her co-religionists renouncing the doctrine of jihad.

Ask her to explain why German, Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants managed to refrain from stabbing, shooting, and beheading their new fellow-citizens.

And ask her when we can count on support for sharia law declining.  Right now 51% of American Muslims wish to be governed by sharia law and nearly 20% believe that violence is justified to impose it on the country.

Trump did say in his response to Gorbah Hamed, “You know, there’s always a reason for everything.”  Next time, he should elaborate.