RUTHFULLY YOURS

According to the New York Times, “Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians, and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal. Even Pres. Obama joined in.

All seem to have forgotten that Muslims from many Mideast countries have participated in terrorist attacks in the U.S., attacks on U.S. passenger airplanes, and attacks in friendly countries like the Philippines and France. The Muslim terrorists involved in those attacks came from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Pakistan, Chechenia, and others with Muslim populations. America’s leaders ought to have figured out what’s been going on two decades ago.

Had the ban been imposed by Pres. Clinton after the first bombing of the Word Trade Center in 1993 and after the warnings he received from the Philippine Police after the attacks in the Philippines in 1995, we would have avoided the attacks of Muslims in the U.S. during the past two decades and saved thousands of American lives.

The following Muslim attacks took place in the U.S. since 1993: On January 25, 1993 in Langley, Virginia., two Americans were killed and three injured. Who was the perpetrator? An American Muslim named Kasi who was captured by a joint FBI-CIA task force in Pakistan in 1997, tried and executed. On February 26, 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing occurred. A bomb was installed in a van parked in the garage an exploded, killing six and injuring more than one thousand. The bomb was fabricated and emplaced by an Iraqi, Abdul Rahman Yasin. The attack was planned by a group of terrorists from several Muslim countries. Among them were Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil, both of whom were involved in the Bojinka plot in the Philippines the following year. In 1994-5, the so-called Bojinka plot was exposed by the Philippine police. It began with the construction of bombs, which were tested by placing one in a theatre in Manila injuring several patrons and another on a Philippine Airlines airplane on a Manila to Narita route. The plane stopped at Cebu where the terrorist Youssef left the airplane. Yousef had boarded the flight under the assumed name of Arnaldo Forlani, using a false Italian passport. Another bomb was placed under a seat on a Boeing 747 and exploded over Okinawa, killing a Japanese businessman and injuring 10 passengers. The flight was carrying 273 passengers. The blast blew a hole in the floor and the cabin’s rapid expansion severed several control cables in the ceiling, cutting off control of the plane’s right aileron, as well as the first officer’s steering controls. The flight crew maintained control of the Boeing 747-200 and brought it to an emergency landing at Okinawa’s Naha Airport. One of the terrorists was named Murad. According to a report sent from the Philippines to the U.S. in January1995, an American agent who interrogated him stated  “What the subject has in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters.”

Two years later, on September 11, 2001, the second World Trade Center bombing took place. Four planes were hijacked by19 al-Qaeda members. Two planes crashed into the  World Trade Center in New York City one into the Pentagon, and one was forced down by its passengers into a field  near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand were killed. Fifteen of the perpetrators came from Saudi Arabia, a “friendly” Muslim country. Two were from the United Arab Emirates, and one each from Egypt and Lebanon. The terrorists had entered the United States on tourist or student visas.

On July 4, 2002 at Los Angeles airport, an Egyptian gunman shot and killed two people and was himself killed by El Al airline guards. On November 5, 2009, a Muslim American army medical officer at Fort Hood, near Killeen, Texas, killed thirteen soldiers and injured thirty-three. On April 15, 2013, two brothers, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnev, planted bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. The blast killed three and injured one hundred three others. Both immigrated from Chechenya as Muslim refugees Russia warned that one of the brothers was a possible terrorist. But neither the CIA nor the FBI kept track of their activities.

Aside from these bombings, there is ample precedent for bans on travel and immigration to the U.S. In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed which targeted Chinese immigration. In 1932 President Roosevelt and the State Department essentially shut down immigration during the Great Depression. This was accompanied by voluntary repatriation to Europe and Mexico, and coerced repatriation and deportation of between 500,000 and 2 million Mexican Americans in the Mexican Repatriation.

In 1986, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was passed and contained an amnesty for about 3 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, and mandated the intensification of some of the activities of the United States Border Patrol or INS (now part of Department of Homeland Security). It imposed mandatory deportation in some cases. Well over two million individuals have been deported since 1996.

Mark Krikorian, who has served as Executive Director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) since 1995, writes “while the president doesn’t have the authority that Obama has claimed, to let in anyone he wants for any reason (under the guise of “parole”), he does have the statutory authority to keep anyone out, for any reason he thinks best. He notes, that under 8 USC §1182: “Whenever the president finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or non-immigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

Besides the history of Muslim terrorist acts, many Muslims, here and abroad, are believed to look favorably on Jihad and even the actions of Muslim terrorists. As Eli Litman wrote in a letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal (12/14/15):

The fact that mass demonstrations occurred throughout the Muslim world after the Danish Muhammad cartoon incident, but not after any of the dozens of large-scale terror attacks .. is an indirect indication of what is approved of and what is not. Even the OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation of 57 member states) refused to condemn terrorism, labelling it as “acts of resistance” in the aftermath of 9/11 and ever since.

Nor is the mass support of terrorism confined to Islamic Nations; there were no visible Muslim participants in the solidarity marches in France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, nor have the European Muslim communities who had organized so many anti-American demonstrations before both the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, managed even a single march to condemn any of the mass killings in the name of their religion.

This is true of the majority of American Muslims as well.

Muslim failure to control or even criticize Muslim terrorism and to report potential terrorists in their midst justifies taking some action against the entire Muslim community in the U.S. and the rest of the world. As the terrorist actions that have taken place to date confirm, barring Muslim travel to the U.S., with some exceptions, is the least of the actions the U.S. should take. Had we done so under the previous Democratic president, Bill Clinton, we would have avoided thousands of American deaths cause by foreign Muslim terrorists.