Protests challenge Trump’s refugee ban
2017Karen Schraufnagel 2017-02Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 12 →
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12 SOCIALIST ACTION FEBRUARY 2017 Protests erupted throughout the United States and the world following President Trump’s stunning or der that suspended entry into the U.S. by refugees and other travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Africa. Thousands demonstrat ed at airports and federal courthouses. Chants includ ed: “No hate, no fear, refugees are welcome here!”
At least 10,000 rallied against the ban in New York City’s Battery Park on Jan. 29, while taxi drivers held a one-hour strike in solidarity. On the same day, more than 15,000 jammed Boston’s Copley Square, and 15,000 marched in Minneapolis on Jan. 31.
Building on the momentum of the massive Women’s Marches in Washington and hundreds of other cities a day after Trump’s inauguration, the protests have continued into February—even after the ruling by a federal judge that lifted the ban.
The court ruling came in response to a lawsuit by the states of Washington and Minnesota that said the ban harmed residents and mandated discrimination. President Trump tweeted that the court decision was “outrageous.” In its appeal, the White House said that a judge should not be “second-guessing” the presi dent. The dispute is expected to go all the way up to the Supreme Court for settlement.
The Trump administration’s anti-Muslim policies represent a significant escalation in the U.S. war on Is lam. At the same time, these policies are logical exten sions of the bipartisan assaults on the civil rights of Muslims in this country spanning nearly two decades, and always justified as important tools for fighting the “War on Terror.”
When a gunman opened fire inside the Quebec City Islamic Cultural Centre on Jan. 29, killing six worship pers and wounding many more, the White House and Fox News repeatedly characterized it as a terrorist at tack by a Muslim terrorist, audaciously exploiting this massacre of Muslims to justify their escalating attack on Muslims. It was revealed quickly that the Muslim man from Morocco blamed for the attack by reaction aries was actually a witness to the massacre who had called the police.
The perpetrator of the Quebec attack, Alexandre Bissonnette, is a white nationalist who admires Trump, illustrating how individuals with prejudices are encouraged into action by powerful people using inflammatory rhetoric, magnified by repetition in the sensationalist capitalist media.
As the true story came out, the White House and Fox News continued to maintain their “alt” interpretation of events. Meanwhile, in the rest of the capitalist press, references to a “terrorist” attack quickly stopped and were replaced with “lone gunman” stories more con sistent with the underlying narrative that recognizes violence as terrorism only if the perpetrator is Mus lim.
Trump issued his edict against Muslims as an Execu tive Order on Jan. 27. Rudolph Giuliani explained on Fox News the next day that Trump had told him he wanted a “Muslim ban,” but he wanted to do it legally. So the administration hatched a plan: “And what we did was, we focused on, instead of religion, danger! The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal. Per fectly sensible. That’s what the ban is based on.”
Of course “danger,” unlike religion, is a subjective no tion. And many see through this transparent rationale. Glenn Greenwald explained in a recent Intercept ar ticle: “The sole ostensible rationale for this ban—it is necessary to keep out Muslim extremists—collapses upon the most minimal scrutiny.
“The countries that have produced and supported (Above) Airport rally in Pittsburgh against Trump’s ban on refugees. the greatest number of anti-U.S. terrorists—Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar, UAE—are excluded from the ban list because the tyrannical regimes that run those countries are close U.S. allies. Conversely, the countries that are included—Syria, Iraq, Libya, So malia, Iran, Sudan, and Yemen—have produced vir tually no such terrorists; as the Cato Institute docu mented: ‘Foreigners from those seven nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015.’ Indeed, as of a 2015 study by the New America research center, deaths caused by terrorism from right-wing nation alists since 9/11 have significantly exceeded those from Muslim extremists.”
Democratic Party politicians, and some Republicans, also criticized the directive from the White House— often with surprising frankness. Senator Chris Mur phy (D-Conn.) succinctly tweeted: “We bomb your country, creating a humanitarian nightmare, then lock you inside. That’s a horror movie, not a foreign policy.”
The Trump administration’s ban is a continuation of the Orwellian logic that has been a centerpiece of the War on Terror from the start. It is the same logic that justified invading Iraq when none of the 9/11 perpe trators were Iraqi, and that reclassified every male in a “combat zone” as an enemy combatant in order to artificially reduce the number of civilian casualties from U.S. drone strikes.
It is the same logic that creates programs like Coun tering Violent Extremism (CVE), tying funding for essential social services to cooperation with surveil lance and entrapment of entire “suspect” communi (continued on page 5, in “Road tolls: Highway to greater inequality”)