Hysterical Reaction to Immigration Order Further Divides Two Americas

Jessica Rinaldi/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Hysterical Reaction to Immigration Order Further Divides Two Americas

On Friday, United States President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily restricting the immigration of refugees coming from seven Muslim countries known for exporting jihadists: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. And over the weekend, the radical left collectively lost its mind.

Shockwaves,” blared the headline at cnn Saturday—in all caps. The world is stunned, we’re told. U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer spoke melodramatically of tears running down the cheeks of Lady Liberty. Huffington Post turned the Statue of Liberty on her head under the headline, “Discrimination Nation.”

There is not one mention of “Muslim ban” in President Trump’s executive order, but you would never know it judging by the media coverage. And where was this hysterical reaction when President Obama used a pen and phone to restrict refugee admissions during his presidency? Obama banned Iraqi refugees for six months in 2011. It wasn’t until his last year in office that he permitted large numbers of Syrian refugees to come to America. And one of his final acts as president was to abolish the “wet foot, dry foot” policy that ensured a safe haven for Cuban refugees fleeing Castro’s prison.

President Obama could do no wrong.

President Trump, on the other hand, is Adolf Hitler—and temporarily restricting immigration flow until the screening process can be improved is worse than Nazism.

Of course, leaving aside fake news, truth seekers understand that President Trump has good reason to be concerned about jihadist infiltration into refugee camps. The terrorists themselves have openly bragged about sneaking into Europe and America through cracks in the immigration process! And it’s not like Europe and America have escaped the gruesome acts of jihadism.

We’ve been hit hard. And given the “terrible recent track record of completed and attempted terror attacks by Muslim immigrants,” as David French noted at the National Review, “it’s clear that our current approach is inadequate to control the threat. Unless we want to simply accept Muslim immigrant terror as a fact of American life, a short-term ban on entry from problematic countries combined with a systematic review of our security procedures is both reasonable and prudent.”

To confront this threat, Mr. Trump’s executive order directs the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies to conduct a thorough review of their screening processes for refugees. To do this, refugee entry from the above-mentioned nations has been put on hold for four months. As French correctly notes, President Trump actually “backed down dramatically from his campaign promises.” Friday’s executive order is nowhere close to the Muslim ban he sometimes floated out on the campaign trail.

Mr. Trump also limited the number of refugees allowed to enter the U.S. each year to 50,000—about where it stood during George W. Bush’s presidency and the first few years of Mr. Obama’s.

“The bottom line is that Trump is improving security screening and intends to admit refugees at close to the average rate of the 15 years before Obama’s dramatic expansion in 2016,” wrote French. “Obama’s expansion was a departure from recent norms, not Trump’s contraction.” Mr. Trump also put a hold—again, not a permanent ban—on refugees entering from Syria, while the presidency makes sure the process does not let in terrorists.

This order puts the clock all the way back to … 2014. It wasn’t until 2015 that Mr. Obama began allowing in Syrian refugees in any large numbers. As French wrote:

To recap: While the Syrian Civil War was raging, isis was rising, and refugees were swamping Syria’s neighbors and surging into Europe, the Obama administration let in less than a trickle of refugees. Only in the closing days of his administration did President Obama reverse course—in numbers insufficient to make a dent in the overall crisis, by the way—and now the Democrats have the audacity to tweet out pictures of bleeding Syrian children?It’s particularly gross to see this display when the Obama administration’s deliberate decision to leave a yawning power vacuum—in part through its Iraq withdrawal and in part through its dithering throughout the Syrian Civil War—exacerbated the refugee crisis in the first place. There was a genocide on Obama’s watch, and his tiny trickle of Syrian refugees hardly makes up for the grotesque negligence of abandoning Iraq and his years-long mishandling of the emerging Syrian crisis.When we know our enemy is seeking to strike America and its allies through the refugee population, when we know they’ve succeeded in Europe, and when the administration has doubts about our ability to adequately vet the refugees we admit into this nation, a pause is again not just prudent but arguably necessary. It is important that we provide sufficient aid and protection to keep refugees safe and healthy in place, but it is not necessary to bring Syrians to the United States to fulfill our vital moral obligations. …Trump’s order was not signed in a vacuum. Look at the Heritage Foundation’s interactive timeline of Islamist terror plots since 9/11. Note the dramatic increase in planned and executed attacks since 2015. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time to take a fresh look at our border-control and immigration policies. Trump’s order isn’t a betrayal of American values. Applied correctly and competently, it can represent a promising fresh start and a prelude to new policies that protect our nation while still maintaining American compassion and preserving American friendships.

The overblown, hysterical backlash, the complete distortion by the media and the grandstanding by politicians and celebrities alike expose the deep divisions within America’s society. No wonder so many are concerned about a “Muslim ban” if this is what they’re confronted with on their tv news:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Xhv3o0Tzw&feature=youtu.be&t=1m9s

As that speaker admitted—this is not a Muslim ban. But to her, all that matters is that people feel that this is a Muslim ban. Mr. Trump’s team has certainly been guilty of blurring the truth with “alternative facts.” But the left is at it too. That logic goes down a very slippery slope. Why do some feel like this is a Muslim ban? Because the media is telling them it is!

Here America’s national security is at risk in a clear and direct way. Yet too many are more desperate to attack a president they despise than they are to keep America safe. That’s not to say that this ban is the right thing for America to do. But you can disagree with it without thinking Donald Trump is Hitler.

With that said, President Trump and his team are not innocent here. A lot of the chaos and confusion comes from mistakes in the way the order was carried out. Mistakes in its application and legal errors in the document itself caused major problems because of “incompetence of the highest order,” as Ben Shapiro put it. French wrote that the application of the law to green-card holders “is madness.”

“The plain language of the order doesn’t apply to legal permanent residents of the U.S., and green-card holders have been through round after round of vetting and security checks,” he continued.

Those defending Mr. Trump’s order have been almost universally critical of the way it was carried out. The U.S. Border and Customs services appear to have been caught by surprise and are confused by what the order meant. In this divided climate, the U.S. administration could have done much more to ensure this went into force more smoothly.

The fact is, few on either side in this divided America are interested in any kind of unity. “Many Americans are troubled by the divisions and hatreds being expressed right now,” wrote Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry in the January issue of the Trumpet magazine. “But they need to be a lot more concerned than they are!” (“America’s Coming Civil War”).

When one side wants to seize any excuse make out that the other is basically Hitler, those are some pretty concerning divisions.

Mr. Flurry warned of the dangers of this in a Key of David given in 2011:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqda6yekW-U&t=9m47s

This division in America is a real danger. By making President Donald Trump out to be like Hitler, the media is stirring up a lot of strong emotion. This emotion and this division will cause very real damage to America.

But there is hope. God does have a solution to the division. It is a solution that will, in time, make America great again. For this solution, watch the rest of Mr. Flurry’s Key of David program “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.”