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Remember the so-called “Muslim ban” (or “Muslim travel ban”) of the first Trump administration? It was never intended to apply only to Muslims, nor were all Muslims covered by it. The criterion for being subject to the ban was simple: did the country in question harbor terrorists and terror organizations, and did it adequately gather and share information about them with the United States? Now the Trump administration is talking of reimposing that ban on countries which have terrorists on their soil, and are unable to adequately provide information about them to American authorities. What was called a “Muslim ban” did not apply to 95% of the world’s Muslims. Furthermore, it applied to only 5 of the 57 majority-Muslim nations. Nonetheless, when Trump puts back the ban on those countries — no doubt with some additions to, and omissions from, the list that appeared in 2017 — we will again hear shrill cries of outrage about a “Muslim ban.” More on the plan by Trump to reimpose a “travel ban” on countries that cannot or will not provide information on terrorism can be found here: “Trump plans to bring back what Dems lied and called ‘Muslim ban’ — it’s about terrorism,” by Todd Bensman, New York Post, November 14, 2024:
Not long before President Donald Trump, in his first term, issued his so-called “travel ban” on 13 countries, Somalia-born Abdul Razak Ali Artan drove a Honda Civic into a crowd of fellow Ohio State University students and got out slashing with a butcher knife, injuring 11.
Campus police shot the young jihadist refugee to death, ending the Nov. 28, 2016 attack.
But this tragedy — and far too many other terrorism cases — would never have happened under Trump’s soon-after installed, falsely named “Muslim travel ban,” which sharply curtailed immigrant and non-immigrant US visas for foreign nationals from Somalia and 12 other nations where international terrorist groups operate.
Had the ban been in place, Abdul Razak Ali Artan would not have been in America, where he tried to run down, and then stabbed, eleven college students with a butcher knife.
Two years earlier, US authorities had authorized the Somali, his mother and seven siblings to settle in Ohio on refugee applications from a Pakistan camp.
They’d never have been allowed in at all were it in place.
Trump’s policy attracted so much backlash from virtue-signaling political oppositionists in the Democratic Party (whose publicists came up with the sticky “Muslim ban” label) that presidential candidate Joe Biden campaigned to rescind it and quickly followed through in March 2021 with a “Proclamation on Ending Discriminatory Bans on Entry to The United States.”
The ban did not discriminate against Muslims. It kept out Muslims and non-Muslims alike from countries that could not or would not cooperate with ”American security-vetting processes.” Keep firmly in mind that 95% of the world’s Muslims were not covered by the ban.
But now that Trump plans to resuscitate what he called his “famous Travel Ban” for a second term, Americans deserve to know its common-sense original national security purpose.
And, because times have changed, the incoming administration should consider expanding the original list of problematic countries far beyond the 13 that were last on it — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, North Korea, Burma, Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan and Tanzania.
At its heart, the immigrant visa restrictions were only ever meant to apply to countries of terrorism concern that don’t, won’t, or can’t cooperate with American security-vetting processes.
The countries on the list have gone entirely ungoverned for years and therefore are unable to take an American request for information and intelligence.
A good example is Somalia, which went ungoverned by any “recognized competent civil authority” for 25 years of civil war, to the extent that most citizens born after 1991 have no birth certificates, driver licenses, marriage papers or criminal records….
And some countries on the list are able, but unwilling, to provide the necessary information to the Americans; these include Iran and North Korea.
Similarly, Yemen, under US-hating Houthi rebel group rule, is useless in US security vetting.
Consider the case of Gaafar Muhammed Ebrahim Al-Wazer, 25, made legal entry into the United States in 2014: He swore on his visa applications while in front of an American officer in the US embassy that he had no affiliations with the Houthi rebels….
Al-Wazer entered the US three years before Trump’s travel ban — that its enemies call the “Muslim ban” — was put in place. Had it been in place, he never would have been allowed in.
Before Trump left office, his administration showed it was willing to add or subtract countries as changing circumstances required.
For instance, it added Nigeria, Kyrgyzstan, Eritrea, Tanzania and Myanmar for their inability to help the US do security vetting.
Tanzania and Myanmar are not “Muslim” countries, while Nigeria is only 50% Muslim. And all any country needed to do to remove itself from the ban was to improve its “systems for managing and sharing information about their nationals” with the US. Two Muslim states, Iraq and Chad, did just that, and were taken off the “travel ban” list. Doesn’t that prove that the adequacy of the information-sharing, and not Muslim beliefs, is what determined a country’s appearance on the list? Iraq has, however, in the last two years it has exhibited a distinctly hostile attitude toward America, and may therefore be put on the new list.
The law on the travel ban was upheld by the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii. In its decision, the majority found the proclamation of the travel ban applied to nationals of countries that did not, or could not, supply intelligence information about its nationals as requested by the American government. The Court said the ban did not favor or disfavor any particular religion. The majority of the Court found that the fact that many majority-Muslim countries were not subject to restrictions and that some non-majority-Muslim countries were subject to the restrictions supported the government’s contention that the Proclamation was not based on anti-Muslim animus, and was instead based on “a sufficient national security justification.”
That travel ban will again be imposed on the countries placed on the new list compiled by the Trump administration. It will include almost all of the countries that were on the first list, with a handful of additions and omissions. About half will be the Muslim-majority lands. But this time, following the decision in Trump v. Hawaii, the ban will withstand any legal challenge to it. And Americans, in their turn rightward, are in no mood to tolerate any CAIR-promoted hysteria about what they are again ready to denounce as Trump’s “racist Muslim ban.”
This post was originally published on here
