Two Minutes of Hate

Trump's "Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States" implemented a temporary ban on immigration from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and Libya. The text of that executive order is available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2017/01/27/executive-order-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states

Based on the level of vitriol in the reaction to that order, people would rather spend hours protesting something they did not spend 30 minutes reading. After all, why take 30 minutes out of your day to determine what to think when the media will do that for you in two minutes?

What is this executive order about, and what are the protests about?

The executive order is not about immigration
Most everybody is from someplace else, therefore there is nothing special about immigration, regardless of how much immigrants are apotheosized. America is not a country of immigrants, we are a country of pioneers. What is important about immigration is how immigrants arrived and what the individual immigrants do with their lives after arriving. Do they open a restaurant or other business, do they provide for their family, do they integrate into the larger community - in essence, do they become proud Americans? Or do they try their hardest to stay "economic migrants" or "hyphenated-Americans"? Or, at worst, do they attempt to convert America into the countries from which they escaped? Becoming American is commendable, and should be supported, but there are no provisions in that executive order excluding immigrants who merely wish to stand on our soil.

It is the right of every sovereign nation to determine who can and who cannot legally enter within its borders. Of the 196 countries on this planet, only seven were excluded by this executive order. So, the order isn't about immigration. Nor is it an absolute ban on immigration from those seven countries, since there are exceptions made for people from those seven countries "traveling on diplomatic visas, North Atlantic Treaty Organization visas, C-2 visas for travel to the United Nations, and G-1, G-2, G-3, and G-4 visas" as well as explicit provisions for case-by-case review.

Lest we forget, Trump's wife is herself an immigrant.

It is not about Islam
The order not only bans Muslims from the seven countries covered by the order, it bans all people, with the exceptions listed above. In fact, two of the families stranded at Philadelphia International Airport were Christian families fleeing from Syria - and they were not returned to Syria.

None of the five countries with the largest Muslim populations are on the list. The words "Muslim" or "Islam" appear nowhere in the EO. The references to Islam are indirect, like this paragraph from section 1 of the EO:

"In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including "honor" killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation."

There can be no justification for harboring those who enjoy the benefits of living in our republic while trying destroy it, so why not deny entry to those who harbor ill will to our Constitution and our founding principles? We are not obligated to aid and abet our own destruction.

Further, why shouldn't we keep out anyone who would "oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation"? We have fought too long and too hard to win the rights of minorities and women and gays and lesbians in this country, and it makes no sense to reverse those gains.

What else isn't the executive order about?
It isn't about racism, since there is no such thing as the "Islamic race" or the "immigrant race". It isn't about free speech, either. If you think this is a "free speech" issue, look at what happened yesterday at UC Berkeley, home of the Free Speech Movement. So much for Michelle Obama's "when they go low, we go high" policy.

What, then, is the executive order about?
The executive order is an attempt to protect America against foreign terrorism. The seven countries are not even specified in the executive order itself, but were identified in the Terrorist Prevention Act of 2015 and its 2016 extension as being current fomenters of terrorists. The order limits entry to people from only those seven countries, requires that the vetting process be improved, requires the completion of a biometric tracking system, and requires public reporting of immigration statistics.

These are the types of actions that should have been taken following the terrorist attacks on 9-11, or at Boston, Ft. Hood, San Bernardino, Orlando, or Mumbai, or multiple places in Pakistan, or Paris (two times), or Berlin, Cologne, or at a whole host of other attack locations.

Finally, what are the protests about?
When Obama banned Cuban immigrants from arriving here, there were no protests. When the Obama administration chose that list of seven countries in 2015 and 2016, where was the outrage? It is easy to say that the root cause of the protests is the election of Trump, or rather, Hillary Clinton's loss. While this is true in part, it is also about the abrogation of the individual's responsibility to determine beliefs based on his or her own observations, research, and reasoning. The protesters are being told what to think, rather than figuring it out for themselves. And they see no problem with this.

The protests are nothing but "Two Minutes of Hate."

Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie

After the November 13th terrorist attacks on Paris, many Facebook users added a French flag to their profile picture. The reason I didn't was simple: in January of this year the Islamic terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo office in Paris, and the French learned nothing from it. The French continued to follow the European Union's open border policy, they continued to allow "refugees" in to their country, and they allowed the Muslims already in their country to remain. As the old saying goes: "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

Je ne suis pas Charlie.

President Obama wants to resettle 10000 "refugees" over the next year into our country. Most governors have stated that they would not accept Syrian "refugees", but a few, like Pennsylvania's Tom Wolf, welcome them with open arms. Well, that's not quite true: Wolf will not allow the "refugees" to live in his house or in the Governor's Mansion. He will not be paying for their expenses out of his own pocket. It will therefore be more accurate to say that Wolf is welcoming the "refugees" with other people's open arms and open pocketbooks.

This is the first of many problems with "refugee" resettlement: proponents have no "skin in the game". They play fast and loose with other people's safety, lives, and money.

Those in favor of admitting "refugees" could (if they had a sense of history) point to the 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, an ocean liner whose captain attempted to smuggle 900 Jews out of Nazi Germany only to be turned away by the United States. The Jews were returned to European countries that were soon conquered by the Nazis. Those who use this argument conveniently ignore the fact that Jews are not known for practicing Sharia law, nor beheading people, nor hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings.

Proponents of resettlement further claim that those "refugees" would be vetted - something that FBI Director James Comey and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said would be "challenging".

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders simply continue to wear their rose-colored blindfolds, refusing to name the problem, or claiming that global warming is the cause of Islamic terrorism. Republican presidential candidates aren't doing much better - Ted Cruz is proposing a religious test, as if that would be any more reliable than the background checks that Comey and Clapper discredit. Most damning of all is the answer given by Donald Trump and Ben Carson: monitor the Muslims and their mosques. I'll get to them in a second.

Even if there were some way of determining that a "refugee" was never, is not now, and will never become a terrorist, this is not enough. The reason why it is not sufficient is that it is simply impossible for said "refugees" to check their Islamism at the door.

Religious faith is by nature the most fundamental set of beliefs that one can have. It is how a believer views the world, and is how the believer judges himself as well as the other people, things, and events in that world. It colors everything about them. It is for this reason that people who adopt a faith out of convenience appear so phony, and why it is simply not possible for an individual to have a "religion d'jour."

At this point, some people might start swapping verses from the Koran or the Hadith, but those quotes are just the trees getting in the way of the forest. The faith is the cause, and it is the consequences of that faith that are at issue.

What are the consequences for changing faiths in an Islamic country? What is the punishment for being gay or lesbian in an Islamic country? When a man rapes an Islamic woman, which one is held responsible? This is what Obama, Wolf, and the various aid agencies are bringing into our country. They're not just admitting "refugees", they are admitting the rationalizations for savagery that come along with them, rationalizations that made them "refugees" in the first place.

When you have a population of savages, you need a police state to keep them in check. This is why the "Arab Spring" was and is so disastrous. This is why Trump's and Carson's proposals to monitor Muslims and their mosques are so disappointing: they are following the usual politician's line of having the government solve a problem that was itself created by the government. The only reason Trump and Carson are as popular as they are is their "anti-politician" positions.

The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect the lives and property of its citizens. Our government is not the world's policeman, or the world’s babysitter, or the world's enlightener of savages. By allowing the "refugees" in, Obama and Wolf are defaulting on their jobs as head of their respective governments.

If they were indeed doing their job, they would understand the following: a potential immigrant to this country should only be granted admittance if it is in our best interest, and sowing the ideological seeds of barbarism in our own land is certainly not in our best interest. Continuation of the surveillance state is not in our best interest, either. Having savages in our country pits our freedom against our safety from them. Whether the immigrant is a "refugee" is irrelevant. What is relevant is this: you can take the Muslim out of the Caliphate, but you can't take the Caliphate out of the Muslim.

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NOTE: as I was finishing this essay, Muslims were in the process of killing people in San Bernardino. Does it matter whether the perpetrators were "refugees"?