Trump’s 'Muslim ban’

“Where the questions of religion are concerned people are guilty of every possible kind of insincerity and intellectual misdemeanor.” 

                       -       Sigmund Freud

                         The Future of an Illusion

There is a vexing and doleful attempt on the Left to make a mountain out of a mole hill and obfuscate some simple truths with the whole ‘Muslim ban’ affair. Getting to the chase:

It is not a Muslim Ban

Words matter and the media has been allowed to get away from calling it a ‘Muslim ban’. The executive order is not a ban but a temporary suspension of entry with a clear duration (90 days). It is targeting countries from which emanate a high risk of terrorist infiltration (determined by the Obama administration as countries of concern and mandated by the  terrorist organisations with sadly many successes). The executive order is aimed to allow time to plug obvious holes in the current vetting system. The top five countries with the most Muslim citizens, and another 39 Muslim majority countries were not on the list, let along Muslim citizens from other countries, making it a very poor Muslim ban if that was the intent.

The reason why the countries on the list are Muslim majority countries is because while most Muslims are perfectly peaceable, the fact remains that Islamist groups are responsible for the majority of terrorist attacks. According to the Institute for Economics and Peace 2016 Global Terrorism Index, the most comprehensive such database, of the 274 known terrorist groups, four groups – ISIS, Boko Haram, the Taliban and Al-Qa’ida, were responsible for 74% of all deaths from terrorism in 2015 (~20,000 people), with ISIS being the most deadly, carrying out attacks in 28 countries. One should really be criticising the executive order for not including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two major sponsors and exporters of terrorists. I personally don't think the executive order is the most efficient way to tackle this but at least it is an attempt to address a problem.

It is not illegal

According to American law, whatever you might think of the executive order, it is clearly legal under provisions of section 212(f) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which says that the president can suspend the entry of any alien or group of aliens if he finds it to be detrimental to the national interest. The argument that it violates the First Amendment is not relevant as the Constitution doesn’t extend to non-American citizens and it doesn’t prohibit Muslims from practising their faith in the US at all. Furthermore, no one has a natural right to enter another country.

Biased Judges

The Judges who ruled against the two executive orders did not judge the documents, which did not mention Muslims or religion. They were clearly over extending their mandate by making their judgement essentially not by the document, but by what Trump said in the election campaign. The Judge’s job is to ensure that the actions of the executive falls in accordance with the law. In neither ruling did the Judges even bring up section 212(f). Furthermore, they were factually incorrect. The first Judge falsely claimed that there has been no Jihad attacks from any of the countries on the first list of the temporary travel suspension – there had been 72 people convicted of perpetrating or plotting terrorist attacks from those countries since September 11^th:

• Somalia: 20
• Yemen: 19
• Iraq: 19
• Syria: 7
• Iran: 4
• Libya: 2
• Sudan: 1
• Total: 72

As to the second ruling, the plaintiff who filed the complaint was an Imam of a Honolulu mosque, Ismail Elshikh, whose mosque is financed by the North American Islamic Trust. The Trust is listed in captured internal documents of the Muslim Brotherhood as a front group, as well as having financial links with Hamas, groups dedicated to destroying Western civilization with systematic plans, including ‘Civilization-Jihad’ where “the Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers”. This massive irony is not reported by mainstream media.  

The need for border control reform

Why the need for the temporary suspension to reset the vetting process? One recent and pertinent example: the 2015 San Bernardino attack, where Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, a married couple, killed 14 people and injured 22 seriously at a Christmas party of the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health. This was the deadliest terrorist attack since September 11^th, until the Orlando shooting in 2016. The pair had a 6 months old daughter when they decided to execute their attack. Malik entered the US on a K-1 (fiancée) visa with a Pakistani passport in 2014 and was vetted by 5 separate federal agencies. Why didn’t these agencies pick her up as a potential terrorist despite her public support for violent jihad on social media? Because they are not trained to know. Why? Because the Obama administration has determined not to recognise the fundamentalist Islamic Jihad against the US and the West. Obama, even after Orlando, where Omar Seddique Mateen killed 49 people in a gay club, did not use the terms ‘Islam’, ‘Muslim’, or even ‘radical Islamic terrorism’. The Obama administration, in 2011, officially forbade any mention of Islam or Jihad to be made in connection with counter terrorism, which is still the policy. Which means that if you were to join the FBI or CIA today to fight terrorism, you would not learn a single thing about jihad. This is worse than the Voldemort syndrome, this is the active suppression of looking an enemy in the face, making identifying them impossible. 

Ideological mistakes of the Left

Islam is not a race, Muslim is not a community

The regressive Left loves to think of themselves as considerate and sophisticated but they betray how little they know by always lumping Muslims together. The Sunni and Shia have been fighting themselves for over 1,000 years and have been persecuting minority sects such as the Ahmadis, Baha’i and the Alawites, not to mention the Yazidis, who are mostly ethnically Kurdish and whose religion is a mixture of Islam with Zoroastrianism. The Arab Christians, like the Melkites and Eastern Orthodox sects have been slaughtered by the Muslims, intensely so in recent years despite their shared ethnicity. Other Kurds, the majority of whom are Sunni Muslim, have been and are being persecuted by their fellow Muslims in multiple countries based on ethnic differences. The Persians look down at the Arabs and the Arabs don’t always get along with the Turks. And they are all mandated by the Koran (9:29) and the Hadith (Sahih Bukhari (52:177)) to hate the Jews, including ancient people like the Mizrahi Jews, who are exiling Europe in response to increasing anti-Semitism, chiefly from European Muslims - an ADL poll found 55% of European Muslims harbour anti-Semitic attitudes. A 2016 poll of Jews in 9 major EU countries including Germany, UK and France found that a quarter of Jews are afraid to identify being Jews in public, with 50% in Sweden and 40% in France fearing to do so for fear of attacks. 

This fragile mosaic also shows how asinine it is for the halo-polishers to accuse people, including many Muslims such as Maajid Nawaz, Asra Nomani, Raheel Raza and secularists from the Muslim world such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Salman Rushdie and Sarah Haidar, who wish to challenge Islamic fundamentalism, which chiefly comes from Wahabis and Salafists, as being ‘racist’. It is precisely the Left who fails to distinguish or bother even to learn the often life and death distinctions in the ‘Muslim world’ or support the persecuted minorities who are fighting for basic rights for millions of Muslims and other minorities in the Middle East that the Left themselves enjoy without consideration or appreciation.

Cultural implosion

It is a sad situation that the Muslim Brotherhood mandate to destroy the West by “‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands” seems to be working. The regressive Left, at least, is so fixated on not offending Muslims that they are willing to tolerate the intolerable so that not one Muslim might possibly, gasp, be offended. Besides being extremely patronising towards Muslims, the majority of whom I’m sure would not like to be treated like spoilt children, it is also doomed to fail, but not before society is ripped apart. In Sweden, Germany and other countries that have taken in massive numbers of immigrants from the Middle East over the last two years (the majority of whom are not Syrian refugees), the same political decision and tacit toleration and indeed open cover up of criminal behaviours from the migrants has caused increases in rape, ghettos being formed, areas where police will avoid and segregated swimming pools. The impotent police in Ostersund is reduced to telling girls not to go out alone after dark and handing out anti-rape bracelets, partly due to political pressures and fear of being labelled 'racist' or 'Islamophobes'. The establishment is willing to let more girls get raped rather than taking a tougher stand and possibly be accused of ‘Islamophobia', a term about which Christopher Hitchens remarked: "created by fascists and used by cowards to manipulate morons". Or indeed to wake up to the obvious fact that cultures are not the same and that mass immigration of disproportionately young men (more than 40% of total immigrants are men between the ages of 18-34) from cultures where women are second class citizens is not a recipe for harmonious integration. The Left-leaning American journalist Tim Pool went to Sweden to find out for himself what's happening. He interviews a variety of people, including police officers and politicians as well as common citizens and has some interesting interactions with the local media. His video series is worth watching, as are videos by the Swedish Youtuber Angry Foreigner, himself an immigrant to Sweden, and who analyse crime statistics with admirable detail, and an insightful interview by Dave Rubin with Dr Tino Sanandaji, a Kurdish-Swedish economist.

Consequences
This tacit encouragement of bad behaviour from a specific community is also why genuine reformers have such a hard time. For example, an admirable Australian Imam, Imam Shaikh Mohammad Tawhidi, has faced backlash from the Muslim ‘community’ because he proclaims to put Australian law before Sharia and wishes for “an Islam that is compatible with the West”. This exemplary religious leader will get little coverage from the media because of fear of ‘offending’ Muslims and potentially violent consequences. Another example is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who recently cancelled her trip to Australia, where she was to attend among other things, the Think Inc event, for 'security reasons'. Looking at those who signed petitions against her speaking, we see names from both Islamic apologists as well as Leftist 'progressives'. This strange chimera of the modern Left with Islamic fundamentalists, whose ideologies you'd think should be direct opposite on multiple fronts, are working together to shut down the right to freedom of speech of their opponents through threats of violence and character assassination, epitomizes the civilizational problem facing the West. Ali, a Somali woman who was subjected to genital mutilation, escaped an arranged marriage to a cousin, educated herself in the Neatherlands, thought her way painfully from Islam to agnosticism and atheism, and became a parliamentarian fighting for the rights of Muslim women, is branded by these insincere 'Leftist' activists as a 'white supremacist'. If it wasn't so serious, it would be funny. By shutting down people like her, they deny even the beginning of a dialogue that might lead to better lives for women, gays, religious minorities and secularists in the Islamic countries. Furthermore, their actions has given oxygen to the importation of many acts such as female genital mutilation, child brides (tolerated despite conflict with local law), 'honour' killings and Sharia courts to exist in Western societies. As if the ironies cannot get any sharper, the people sharing this regressive Leftist ideology are happy to be led on the Women's March on Washington by the likes of Linda Sarsour, an avowed anti-Semite race baiter with links to Hamas and a supporter of Sharia, who once wrote on twitter that she wished to 'take away Ayaan Hirsi Ali's vagina' because 'she doesn't deserve to be a [woman]'. And Donna Hylton, who, with 6 others, kidnapped and tortured a 62 year old man to the brink of death, including sodomizing him with a 3 foot steel pole. The Southern Poverty Law Centre recently listed Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Maajid Nawaz as 'Anti-Muslim extremists'. Here is a petition to have these two human rights activists removed from the list.

People vote with their feet. The reason why so many people from the Middle East and indeed, from the rest of the world, all want to migrate to the West, is because life under the Western social system, though imperfect, is much better. This is the result of Western culture, that of veneration of personal liberty, rule of law, freedom of speech, separation of Church and State and tolerance of pluralism. However, this tolerance is being allowed to be abused and has mutated into a form of dangerous masochism, where many on the Left will undermine the West's foundational creeds to tolerate the intolerable as a way to moral grandstand. I won’t get into the various reasons including misunderstanding of history and politics that underlie some of this attitude, suffice it to say that the Left is pushing for the West to let go of exactly what made it a good, innovative, free and prosperous civilization, in order to accommodate the potential hurt feelings of the ‘Muslim community’. While the majority of Muslims in the West are upstanding citizens, there is a direct link between certain aspects of the culture under Islam and the way some Muslims behave that is not compatible with a Liberal society. Ask yourself, especially if you are a woman, gay, a Jew, a Christian, a secularist, a feminist or the wrong kind of Muslim living in the West, which Islamic countries you would move to. By not having the confidence of demanding immigrants to conform with Western laws, and insisting on not finding any faults in the culture of the immigrants, the Leftists are playing the worst kind of moral relativism and the victims are their own society, starting with their most vulnerable.

Opposing the White House's temporary travel suspension not for its inefficiency but on grounds of its supposed bigotry, racism or Islamophobia is simply moral peacocking. When the next Islamist terrorist attack in the US inevitably happens, the Regressive Left should know that even if they don't feel foolish, they will certainly look it. There are many uncomfortable truths to be faced when talking about personal things like religion. But when lives and basic freedoms and the future of Liberal culture are at stake, the least we can do is start an adult conversation free from vituperative name-calling. 



"You will be told, you can’t complain – because you’re Islamophobic. The term is already being introduced into the culture, as if it’s an accusation of race hatred or bigotry, whereas it’s only the objection to the preachings of a very extreme and absolutist religion.
Watch out for these symptoms… The barbarians never take a city until someone holds the gates open to them. And it’s your own multicultural authorities who will do it for you.”

                                                                                                - Christopher Hitchens
                                                                                                    Birmingham, Alabama, 2009