President Donald Trump declared an Executive Order on Friday, January 27th, titled "PROTECTING THE NATION FROM FOREIGN TERRORIST ENTRY INTO THE UNITED STATES", causing an uproar. Here is my response.
1. President Trump's Executive Order is not a Muslim ban.
As you can clearly see in the data table below, Pew Research Center lists the the top ten countries with the largest numbers of Muslims.
NPR Washington Desk Correspondent, Brian Naylor, explains:
These countries were also specified in restrictions to the visa waiver program made by the Obama administration last year. Under the program, people from 38 countries can enter the U.S. with no visa whatsoever. These include most of our EU allies. Some 20 million people entered the U.S. under the visa waiver program in 2014, the Department of Homeland Security reports. Members of Congress had called for a tightening of the program, noting for instance that foreign fighters from several European nations have traveled to Syria to fight alongside ISIS and then returned to Europe.
Naylor explains that President Obama restricted certain countries in the visa wavier program last year, indicating that terrorists could bypass the system after fighting in Europe. As NPR Political Editor Domenico Montanaro points out, if you search for "Christian" or "Muslim" in the full document, you won't find those words. In fact, Muslim countries refuse to take a single Syrian refugee in, citing the risk of exposure to terrorism:
Five of the wealthiest Muslim countries have taken no Syrian refugees in at all, arguing that doing so would open them up to the risk of terrorism. Although the oil rich countries have handed over aid money, Britain has donated more than Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar combined.
2. President Trump's Executive Order is constitutional.
The Executive Order he signed was neither unconstitutional nor unlawful. It's known at the McCarran-Walter Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 allows for the "suspension of entry or imposition of restrictions by the President, whenever the President finds that the entry of aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States." President Jimmy Carter invoked the act to keep Iranians out of the US in 1979. It also states that an "applicant for immigration must be of good moral character and in agreement with the principles of our Constitution".
Read the full text, 8 U.S. Code 1182-Inadmissible aliens, here.
3. Syrian refugees are not comparable to Jewish refugees in Nazi Germany.
There was no threat of Jewish terrorists infiltrating the United States. The same cannot be said about Muslim terrorists.
Jews are classified as an ethno-religious group, suffering under the genocidal programs of Nazi Germany. The western world resisted to take in refugees was not because of the Jews themselves, but because of pre-existing isolationist policies developed as a consequence of WWI. Islamic terror contrasts in threat. There have been countless terrorist attacks across the Western world by Muslim fanatics that can't be overlooked. The American Thinker notes that
Jews who came to America were not themselves violent. They did not strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up in theaters; they did not go into restaurants and execute diners, one by one, they did not attempt to set up a caliphate wherever they moved to, although they did tend to dominate the deli, bagel-making, and stand-up comedy fields.
Jewish victims of the Holocaust had nowhere else to go. Muslim refugees do.
Arab states have been notoriously resistant and outright hostile when confronted with an influx of Muslim refugees at their gates. “There are at least two dozen Muslim countries, many of them wealthy gulf states, who could easily afford to take in refugees. During the Holocaust, there was no Jewish state that could take in Jews. That's a big difference,” asserts American Thinker. There was no Jewish state of Israel or safe havens for Jews to flee to. Today, there are scores of Muslim-majority states and even Islamic theocracies that celebrate religious brotherhood with hypocritical zeal. Relatively stable Arab states even exploit the grievances of Muslim refugees from neighboring failed Arab states to deflect attention from human rights abuses at home. (Daily Wire)
Muslim immigrants have disproportionately contributed to racist attacks against other minority groups, notably Jews. European Jews are still victims, rather than perpetrators, of anti-Semitic, white and Islamo-Supremacist, acts of harassment, bullying and intimidation.
As referred to by the latest Pew Research Center polls, the majority of anti-Semitic attacks directed against Jews are initiated by members of the Muslim immigrant population. This is unsurprising given the culture of rampant anti-Semitism in the Arab world, particularly in Palestinian territories. “While European views towards Jews have become more negative, the deepest anti-Jewish sentiments exist outside of Europe, especially in predominantly Muslim nations. The percentage of Turks, Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Pakistanis with favorable opinions of Jews is in the single digits,” documents Pew. (Daily Wire)
Read the full article that contrasts Syrian and Jewish Refugees here.
Some of my final thoughts and responses I agree with:
How many people in the US that have come from the countries covered by Trump's Executive Order are being deported? None. They are simply being held until vetting processes are evaluated. At the pace President Trump is going, families will be reunited in no time.
If your basement is flooding, you turn off the water before you fix the pipe. That's all Trump is doing - turning off the water.
Not taking refugees and closing our borders doesn't mean we are "heartless" or "mean". I lock my doors every night. I don't lock them because I "hate" the people outside. I lock them because I LOVE the people INSIDE!
"On her way to work one morning
Down the path along side the lake
A tender hearted woman saw a poor half frozen snake
His pretty colored skin had been all frosted with the dew
"Poor thing, " she cried, "I'll take you in and I'll take care of you"
"Take me in tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in, tender woman, " sighed the snake
She wrapped him up all cozy in a comforter of silk
And laid him by her fireside with some honey and some milk
She hurried home from work that night and soon as she arrived
She found that pretty snake she'd taken to had been revived
"Take me in, tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in, tender woman, " sighed the snake
She clutched him to her bosom, "You're so beautiful, " she cried
"But if I hadn't brought you in by now you might have died"
She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed and held him tight
Instead of saying thanks, the snake gave her a vicious bite
"Take me in, tender woman
Take me in, for heaven's sake
Take me in, tender woman, " sighed the snake
"I saved you, " cried the woman
"And you've bitten me, but why?
You know your bite is poisonous and now I'm going to die"
"Oh shut up, silly woman, " said the reptile with a grin
"You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in"
(https://conservativedailypost.com/watch-donald-tru...)
More resources:
Read the full executive order here.
Read President Trump's response to the protests here.
For a Christian perspective on refugees, read this article.
