Yes, It's a Muslim Ban

The latest talking point from the White House and its allies is that President Trump’s Muslim ban isn’t a Muslim ban. There are lots of countries with Muslim populations that aren’t targeted by the ban, after all. So what’s the big deal.

So how do we know the Muslim ban is a Muslim ban? Because President Trump and his allies have told us so.

This is what Trump called for during the campaign:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump called Monday for barring all Muslims from entering the United States. 

"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," a campaign press release said.

Rudy told us how the administration maneuvered to make the ban legal:

"He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’" 

Giuliani said he then put together a commission that included lawmakers and expert lawyers. "And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger," Giuliani said. 

"The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible."

Which sounds, frankly, like the kind of work lawyers do to offer an executive the “plausible deniability” he craves.

Still, there’s one more piece of evidence:

The national security adviser's son took to Twitter on Saturday to defend President Donald Trump's controversial refugee order, twice referring to it as a "Muslim ban" and calling it a "necessary" step. 

Michael Flynn Jr., who was released from the transition team after spreading a debunked conspiracy theory about a Washington pizza parlor, was formerly a top adviser to his father.

If we've learned anything from our time with Donald Trump, it's to take him literally and seriously. That this is an imperfect Muslim ban doesn't mean it's not a Muslim ban. As Vox.com notes: “The executive order is an evolution of Trump’s actual Muslim ban proposal.” It’s a rose by any other name. We know how that works out.

Trump Treats Jews and Christians Differently

Saturday:

The White House has defended its omission of Jews and antisemitism from a statement remembering the Holocaust by saying that Donald Trump’s administration “took into account all of those who suffered”. 

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Friday, the White House made no mention of Jews, Judaism or the antisemitism that fueled Nazi Germany’s mass murder of six million Jews in the 1940s.

White House representatives did not answer queries about the statement until Saturday, when spokeswoman Hope Hicks forwarded to CNN a link to a Huffington Post article about the millions of people who were killed by Nazis for their ethnicities, sexual orientation, politics or religious beliefs.

“Despite what the media reports, we are an incredibly inclusive group and we took into account all of those who suffered,” Hicks told CNN.

Today:

Now. There's an "incredibly inclusive" group of people in Syria who have been made refugees by the war there, but President Trump has chosen to single one particular group this time.

It's a troubling, and notable, inconsistency.

It's Not Just Muslims. We're Closing the Door to All Refugees.

Matt Welch points out a fact that's lost in most of the coverage I've seen:

The far-reaching order, which marks a sharp reversal of decades' worth of American policy, also slashed the annual target for the number of refugees accepted to 50,000, down from the original 110,000 for fiscal 2017 set by Barack Obama, and from the 85,000 refugees accepted in fiscal 2016. (The Obama administration consistently admitted around 75,000 refugees per year; only George W. Bush was stingier over the past 40 years.)

In other words: We're not just shutting down Muslim immigration. We're closing the door to people fleeing war, poverty, and oppression everywhere.

Last one out, turn out the lights at the Statue of Liberty.

Deep Thought

Kinda funny how those among us who talk toughest are the ones whose actions are most obviously motivated by fear.

FYI: Trump, Immigrants, and Crimes

NYT:

A central point of an executive order President Trump signed on Wednesday — and a mainstay of his campaign speeches — is the view that undocumented immigrants pose a threat to public safety. 

But several studies, over many years, have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. And experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime. 

“There’s no way I can mess with the numbers to get a different conclusion,” said Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, which advocates more liberal immigration laws.

About Christians, Refugees, and Trump

If you call yourself Christian and you're OK with Trump working to save Syrian Christians while banning Syrians of other religions, then Christianity is not your faith, it is not your religion, and it's certainly not your relationship with Jesus.

It's just a tribe. Just a way of dividing us from them. Little could be more profane.

The Trump Era: Refugees

I've spent a decade offering my opinions in public forums, but I don't feel quite equal to this moment. Some of this is sheer flood of outrages — I'm just comprehending one when the next comes along. Which feels like my insights about the Trump Era are often limited to:

This is wrong.
This is wrong.
This is wrong.
This is wrong.

So let's be clear: It's not wrong to want to vet refugees, with a high degree of confidence but also within reason, to try to ensure they won't be a threat to their neighbors in the U.S. We have every right to expect the government will do so.

But to say "no" to refugees entirely — without any effort to separate the wheat from the chaff, but to assign a collective punishment to people already fleeing danger — is not the mark of a great nation. It is a cowardly act. Cowardly. I am ashamed of what my government is doing today. This is wrong. This is wrong. This is wrong.