The Left, as usual, wishes to cast the White House executive order banning residents of seven ardently Islamic countries as being motivated by race and religious prejudice. It’s an entirely predictable stance and, as always, it seeks to obscure the obvious beneath social-justice boilerplate.
It always comes back to Bernard Lewis. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the mainstream media gave Lewis, who turns 101 years old on May 31, a brief window of opportunity to explain the root causes of Islamic revivalism. In 2003, What Went Wrong? topped the New York Times’ list of best-selling paperbacks and The Crisis of Islam performed the same feat in the hardback category. The PC police, confused and dismayed by the horror of September 11, had permitted – even encouraged – consenting adults to discuss the connection between Islam and radical Islamic terrorism. But it was not for long.
Our gatekeepers soon regained their composure and today America, and the West in general, is paying the price, a case in point being the outcry in response to President Trump’s attempt at gatekeeping: Executive Order (EO) 13769 or “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorists Entry into the United States”.
There are, to be sure, reasons to fault the White House’s EO banning entry of nationals from Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Yemen for 90 days and refugees for four months. Many – though not all – Iraqi Kurds, Iranian exiles and Syrian Christians are pro-secular democracy and would prove loyal citizens of the United States, or Australia for that matter. Ed Yong, writing for The Atlantic, makes a convincing case that prohibiting Iranian scientists from obtaining residency is detrimental to the interests of the United States. He adds the salient point that Iranian immigrants, who are for the most part Shia, are not generally prone to Islamic radicalism, let alone acts of terrorism.
Others from the nominated seven countries, Sunni Muslim or otherwise, would relish the opportunity to be patriotic Americans. Conversely, émigrés from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan might be more likely – statistically – to engage in acts of domestic terrorism, despite the two countries being omitted from the Trump’s travel-restriction policy. Take, as an instance, the December 2, 2015, San Bernardino massacre. Syed Farook was an American-born citizen of Pakistani descent while his terrorist wife, Tashfeen Malik, was a Pakistani-born lawful resident of the United States. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11 terrorists were Saudi, the rest from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Lebanon. We might also note that Saudi money, particularly since 1979, has funded the radicalisation/Salafi-style transformation of mosques from Djakarta to, well, San Bernardino.
There is, additionally, the issue of the executive order’s scope and reach being too broad. Even Ken Klukowski, senior legal editor for the pro-Trump Breitbart News, has implicitly acknowledged that EO 13769 contains “legally problematic provisions”, such as the entry ban on those with passports from one of the seven proscribed countries who are also green-card holders and, therefore, lawful permanent residents. Although procedural modifications were soon put in place to circumvent the problem, over the first weekend 109 legitimate travellers were detained and held for questioning. When President Trump emphasised the smallness of the number, given the 325,000 arrivals, the mainstream media mostly ignored his comment or took umbrage. Evan Urquhart, writing for Slate, maintained that injustice is injustice even if only a few are inconvenienced: “When something is unfair and indefensible, the last resort of scoundrels is to downplay the number of people who have been unjustly treated.”
