Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
President Donald Trump’s executive order regarding the entry of various people into the United States, which initially came into effect Jan. 27, has been front-page news ever since.
It targeted three groups: refugees in general, who are blocked from entering the U.S. for the next 120 days; refugees from Syria, who may be barred indefinitely; and citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries, who are barred from entering the U.S. for at least 90 days.
This is technically not actually a Muslim ban: It affects citizens, regardless of faith, of several Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa but not to persons of Islamic faith who carry the passports of almost 200 other countries.
Still, most observers see an anti-Muslim animus informing the decision. The result has been intense fury from Democrats and discomfort among many Republicans.
Meanwhile, a federal district court judge in Seattle on Feb. 3 temporarily blocked the ban.
The administration continues to challenge that ruling and it may be up to the U.S. Supreme Court to render a final decision.
It should also be noted that most of the reaction has ignored the dismal foreign policy failures of former presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama which preceded this draconian move.
It has also, for partisan reasons, overlooked Obama’s own previous restrictions on the intake of refugees. (The countries affected by the edict were initially selected by the Obama administration.)
Two recent articles posted on line have helped place the issue in context: “The Refugee Ban and the Holocaust,” by Walter Russell Mead and Nicholas M. Gallagher, in the American Interest periodical of Jan. 28, 2017; and “The Self-righteous Backlash to Trump’s Immigration Ban Could Play into his Hands,” by Tom Gross, in the Spectator magazine, Jan. 31, 2017.
Mead, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College, a New York liberal arts institution, and Gallagher, who graduated from Oxford University in 2011, assert that “Not since Franklin D. Roosevelt has an American President done anything so cruel and bigoted.”
However, they argue that the failures of the Bush and Obama years “are father to Trump’s callous treatment of refugees.”
The best way to deal with refugee flows is to prevent them from happening, contend the authors. But, they conclude, Obama never took responsibility for his own repeated errors of judgment regarding the Syrian catastrophe, now entering its sixth year.
Gross, a journalist, international affairs commentator, and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East, also castigates Obama.
He, too, maintains that Trump’s executive order “is morally unacceptable (it amounts to collective punishment), strategically dubious (since many terrorists are home-grown or came from countries other than those seven),” and “has caused distress and uncertainty.” It sets an anti-immigrant tone, when immigrants can hugely benefit their new countries.
But Gross, like Mead and Gallagher, maintains that “the war in Syria descended into barbarity in part because President Obama encouraged the rebels, and the Sunni majority population of Syria who supported them, promising them arms and protection, and then abandoned them.”
As well, Obama went on to release billions of dollars in funds to the Iranian regime, whose forces and Shia militia in Syria have done much, if not most, of the killing there these past six years, leading many Syrians to seek sanctuary in Europe and beyond.
Why, Gross asks, were today’s critics largely silent when, during his time in office, Obama deported more immigrants than any other president in history, or when in 2011, Obama stopped admitting Iraqi refugees for six months while the vetting process was re-evaluated?
Obama also signed a 2015 law imposing tighter visa restrictions on foreigners who had traveled to Iran, Iraq, Syria and Sudan within the previous five years. Donald Trump is a latecomer to a tragedy which has been unfolding since 2011.
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