Following Up: Britain’s May is Moving – Though Too Slowly – to Define the Real Terrorism Problem

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Barack Obama, Following Up, Islam, Islamism, London Bridge attacks, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, Susan Rice, terrorism, terrorists, Theresa May, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, travel ban, Trump, United Kingdom

British Prime Minister Theresa May’s remarks following Saturday night’s London Bridge attacks include one of the most forthright, perceptive, and necessary statements from an international leader (excepting President Trump) about the difficulties free societies face in combating terrorist acts committed by Muslims.

Specifically, these comments appear to recognize that these abominations are not simply the product of individuals having nothing whatever to do with their co-religionists, or with the supposedly peaceful, law-abiding, thoroughly assimilated – in other words, utterly unexceptional – communities they comprise. That is, May has closely approached stating that something is decidedly, and often dangerously, abnormal in too many of the Islamic neighborhoods and congregations found in the non-Islamic world, and particularly in the United Kingdom and in the rest of Europe.

As the Prime Minister declared, “While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of [Islamist extremism] in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out – across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult and often embarrassing conversations, but the whole of our country needs to come together to take on this extremism – and we need to live our lives not in a series of separated, segregated communities but as one truly United Kingdom.”

That last clause is extraordinarily important. As I wrote in the wake of last month’s suicide bombing in Manchester, the United Kingdom has officially glorified multiculturalism to such a degree that it has encouraged in many ways the emergence of Muslim population clusters with considerable degrees of autonomy from even the legal system – let alone the values – that holds in the rest of the country.  

May unmistakably has now attacked those policies, and by extension the assumption behind them:  that many of the core teachings of Islam are no better and no worse than those developed in the British Isles throughout their long history. They are simply different. As a result, if certain Muslims living in Britain wish, say, to govern family life with the precepts of their faith rather than British law, they should enjoy ample freedom to do so. Indeed, denying them these rights in the absence of clear and present dangers to – to what, it’s not entirely clear; certainly not the freedoms enjoyed in Britain by other individuals, like women – would be the antithesis of liberty and tolerance.

Yesterday, May strongly suggested that in practice, this segregation has created major dangers at least to national security and public order. And she deserves immense credit for recognizing that, however “difficult and embarrassing” pluralistic democracies like her country may find creating a more united United Kingdom, a concerted effort must not only be made – it must succeed.

Nevertheless, I worry that May herself is still a bit too embarrassed to identify the main problem. For along with describing the enemy belief system as “Islamist,” she also insisted that “It is an ideology that is a perversion of Islam.” Which, if you view as legitimate her alarm at segregated Muslim communities, is a little too neat.

After all, if extremist Islamism indeed “perverts” Islam, presumably this offense would be readily apparent to the vast majority of Muslims themselves. And not only would these segregated communities refuse to tolerate it, and be joining with the national authorities in “identifying it and stamping it out” (May’s own words, as per above). An outraged Muslim majority would be taking the lead in these matters.

But nothing could be more obvious than the general failure of Muslims anywhere to fit this description. Instead, as the Prime Minister herself complains, there has been “too much tolerance,” and the most dangerous manifestations are in those communities whose segregated nature produces Islam in a form relatively un-polluted by British and other non-Islamic values (whatever you suppose them to be).

So May has a ways to go before the clarification of thought that necessarily precedes any course of action with a reasonable hope for success. But she’s clearly much further along than much of the American leadership class. Take Susan E. Rice, national security adviser to former President Obama. On ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, she was asked about President Trump’s proposal to suspend travel to the United States from a handful of majority Muslim countries that the Obama administration itself viewed as either overrun with terrorists or ruled by terrorist-sponsoring regimes. She explained her continued opposition (which is also shared by her former boss) in part this way:

“[I] think there’s a very real risk that by stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks.”

Leave aside your views on the travel ban proposal for or against. First of all, I’ve never been comfortable with the suggestion just made above (and by so many others) that there’s something fundamentally acceptable about residents of the United States (and especially citizens) conditioning their cooperation with law enforcement authorities that are combating violence on whether or not they feel stigmatized in some way by Washington, or any level of government. Are you? And remember – nearly all Muslims resident in the United States live here legally, so it’s not as if they need fear deportation like so many illegal Hispanic residents, or Hispanics here legally here with illegal friends or relatives.

But more important is Rice’s obliviousness to a glaringly obvious implication of her statement: Why, in the first place, are Muslim communities “the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent…homegrown extremists from being able to carry out the attacks”? It’s because so many of the actual attackers and attacker wanna-bes are coming from those communities. Obviously something about them has gone seriously wrong.

I’m not saying I know exactly what needs to be done domestically on top of existing efforts, and how new programs can be squared with essential Constitutional protections. It’s also clear that the United States doesn’t have the kind of related assimilation-segregated communities problems plaguing the United Kingdom and so much of Europe. But I do know that the more solidly the more extreme versions of multiculturalism take root in America, the larger these problems will grow. And the sooner the British more explicitly acknowledge major problems among their compatriots who practice mainstream Islam, the faster they’ll restore acceptable levels of safety to their concert halls, historic bridges, and the rest of their country.

Im-Politic: Manchester and the Wages of Multiculturalism

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assimilation, Christopher Hitchens, Democratic Party, homegrown terrorists, Im-Politic, immigrants, Islam, London, Londonistan, Manchester bombing, multiculturalism, Muslims, New Labour, Saudi Arabia, Sharia, terrorism, Tony Blair, United Kingdom

The aftermath of the horrific Manchester bombing is seeing the reappearance of a familiar pattern that keeps dangerously muddling major issues. I’m talking about the tendency to emphasize that the suspect was a “homegrown” terrorist, not an immigrant or a refugee from a majority Muslim country. Therefore, this reasoning goes, responses that emphasize restricting immigration from such countries are at best misguided and at worst bigoted. The latter charge has even become a mainstay of the U.S. judicial system.

The dangers and fallacies of this analysis become clear upon reviewing the emergence of the United Kingdom as a major target of terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists and a major source of foreign fighters and other operatives in the Middle East and worldwide for Al Qaeda and ISIS. If these terrorists aren’t newcomers to the UK, you can be sure they were overwhelmingly homegrown in the country’s Muslim immigrant communities. And their numbers and destructiveness point to shocking British failures both to control the country’s borders adequately and to assimilate Muslims safely. More specifically, they reveal the perils of the British government’s determination starting in the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s, to make the establishment of an identity politics focused on Muslims a top national priority.

Spearheaded by former Prime Minister Tony Blair and his New Labour party, London dealt with the country’s Muslims as a group with official standing, represented in government councils by a national organization created to “represent mainstream Muslim opinion.” It provided safe haven for prominent jihadists wanted for terrorism by countries like Jordan and France. It permitted a network of Islamic religious law (sharia) courts to spread across the country and formally recognized some rulings involving divorce and other domestic issues. Perhaps most damaging in the long term, it offered “state funding for Muslim schools on the same basis as Christian and Jewish schools” and paid no attention to their curricula – many of which were developed by arch-fundamentalists from Saudi Arabia.

Among the results? As the British government reported after 2001 riots involving white and South Asian gangs in several northern industrial towns, these localities contained

“‘separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks,’ producing living arrangements that ‘do not seem to touch at any point.’ As one Pakistani Briton told the report’s authors, ‘When I leave this meeting with you, I will go home and not see another white face until I come back here next week.’ Last year, Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, warned that much of Britain was ‘sleepwalking its way toward segregation.’ And this segregation is especially entrenched among Muslims.”

In addition, “A non-Muslim child who lives in a Muslim-majority area may now find herself attending a school that requires headscarves. The idea of separate schools for separate faiths—the idea that worked so beautifully in Northern Ireland—has meant that children are encouraged to think of themselves as belonging to a distinct religious ‘community’ rather than a nation.”

In fact, by July, 2005 – in the wake of an Islamist bombing of London’s Tube that claimed 52 innocent lives – even Blair had had enough. In major speech, he warned that anyone who did not “share and support the values that sustain the British way of life,” or who incite hatred against Britain and its people, “have no place here.” But the Manchester attack, and numerous smaller predecessors over the previous twelve years, indicate that his turnabout – which by all accounts had been ambivalently implemented – came too late to slow the destructive dynamics he set in motion.

Skeptics will rightly note that the British experience is a far cry from America’s, with the U.S. Muslim community – whether immigrant or homegrown – showing many fewer signs of dangerous radicalization. At the same time, identity politics has now become such a hallmark of one of the country’s two major political parties that even many of its leaders are warning about the consequences (though mainly at the ballot box). And the late British writer Christopher Hitchens wrote of what had by that time come ruefully to be called “Londonistan” by the time of the 2005 bombing, “It‘s impossible to exaggerate how far and how fast this situation has deteriorated.”

Im-Politic: When Media Bias Turns Downright Incompetent

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Al Qaeda, Alexi McCammond, Axios.com, Barack Obama, Im-Politic, Islam, King Abdullah, King Salman, Michelle Obama, protocol, Queen Elizabeth II, Saudi Arabia, terrorism, Trump

It’s only the middle of a Saturday afternoon and I’ve already changed my mind twice about what to write about. So it goes in the blog business. I confess it’s not the most important subject on the merits that I’ve read about in the last 24 hours. But it is arguably one of the most emblematic of the era of instinctively anti-Trump media coverage (I refuse to dignify it with the word “journalism”) in which we’re living.

As I’m sure you know by now, President Trump left Washington, D.C. yesterday for his first foreign trip, and the first stop has been Saudi Arabia. And almost on cue, the new-ish media site Axios.com posted an article with the sensational headline “Conservatives ignore Trump’s bow to Saudi leader.” And if you know anything about recent U.S.-Saudi diplomacy and protocol, this does indeed seem like an inexcusable example of American right-wing hypocrisy.

After all, conservatives did blast former President Obama in 2009 for bowing to the Saudi king at a meeting in London. And in my view, they were right to do so. Monarchs insist on such gestures as acknowledgments of their supremacy over all supposedly lesser mortals. Why on earth should any U.S. leader – or any American – feed this deeply un-democratic and profoundly un-American conceit? And by the way, I’d apply the same standard to the Queen of England – who, unlike any kings of Saudi Arabia (in all likelihood a major funder of Al-Qaeda and other Islamic terrorist groups), seems like a perfectly nice and in many respects admirable individual.

So indeed – what the heck was Mr. Trump doing emulating his predecessor? And why aren’t conservatives up in arms? Here’s why. As is clear from the two photos in question, Mr. Trump was just bowing slightly to enable King Salman – who is shorter – to give him a medal. Then King Abdullah was also shorter than Mr. Obama. But no act like a medal award was involved that required a lowering of the Obama noggin or a bend at the waist.

Moreover, Axios reporter Alexi McCammond overlooked a genuine opportunity to point out a Trumpian hypocrisy on this score. The president’s wife and daughter, who accompanied him on the trip, and wore no headscarves – something that’s ordinarily a major no-no in Saudi Arabia’s arch-conservative Islamic theocracy. Lately, the Saudis have been making exceptions for visiting foreign dignitaries – hence the bareheaded Trump women. But private citizen Trump didn’t seem to know this in 2015, when he slammed then First Lady Michelle Obama for going headscarf-less on a visit to the Kingdom.

So not only are we living through an era of almost pervasively biased and double standard-ridden “journalism” and social media commentary (coming from all sides, as shown by the Trump comment above). Even by their own debased norms, we’re living through an era of thoroughly incompetent “journalism”:and social media commentary.

Im-Politic: The Travel Industry’s Phony Trump Travel Ban Scare Stories

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Im-Politic, Muslims, September 11, terrorism, tourism, travel, travel ban, travel exports, Trump

The American travel industry clearly employs some great flacks (i.e., public relations specialists). We know this because they’ve sold two major global news organizations on the inane proposition that the Trump administration’s hostility to Muslims and foreigners in general is about to cripple their industry, and that – at least by implication – the U.S. economy will suffer grievously.

The first and perhaps most important failing in this Washington Post article and this Financial Times (FT) piece carrying this message was the glossing over of national security considerations. Both reports noted that the supposedly xenophobic impression was created by the president’s proposed temporary travel ban from six countries identified even by the Obama administration as major potential sources of terrorist threats, and by strengthened vetting procedures at the border. But neither mentioned the counter-argument (either from an administration official or from a non-government specialist supportive of Mr. Trump’s initiatives) that stronger protections for Americans quite naturally carry a price tag, or that any kinds of trade-offs between economic and national security goals are legitimate.

The closest that either piece came to communicating this kind of nuance was a statement in the FT article from Marriot’s CEO acknowledging the role that needs to be played by “some of these other issue [such as security risk]” in formulating policy. In fact, you need to read between the lines (specifically in the Post article) to get any sense that the nation has faced this kind of situation in the recent past – after the September 11 attacks – and that the losses incurred by the travel industry by no means came anywhere near derailing the economy.

One big reason is that the economic role of foreign travel and tourism in the United States simply isn’t very big. The industry itself says that it represented 8.10 percent of total American economic activity last year (a key context-setting fact that the Post completely ignored), when both its direct and indirect effects are included. Fair enough. The figure came out to about $1.5 trillion last year, but that total includes both foreign and domestic travel.

One way to back out the foreign portion of domestic travel and tourism is to use the trade statistics. They don’t provide perfectly apples to apples data, but they’re not way off, either, and show, according to the travel industry, that foreign tourists spent about $194 billion in the United States in 2014. These “travel exports” would have directly accounted for about 8.28 percent of the nation’s total goods and services exports that year, according to official U.S. trade data – and about 1.10 percent of the total economy. There are no statistics on the indirect effects and they of course deserve to be counted. But it’s inconceivable that they would justify even minor concern.

Further, the travel industry isn’t forecasting that all foreign travel to the United States will simply dry up, or even close. In fact, according to the industry, despite the Trump policies and intentions, travel and tourism in the United States (again, including purely domestic travel) will keep growing this year. It just won’t grow quite as fast (by 2.3 percent instead of 2.8 percent). In other words, the Trump effect would barely move the needle.

The implications couldn’t be more obvious. The Trump travel ban and related measures may be bad policy for any number of reasons, but damage to the economy – or even to the tourism industry – clearly isn’t one of them. It’s understandable that the industry itself is unhappy about the prospect of any losses – even moderately slower growth. But why is the media portraying this result as a catastrophe?

Following Up: That Latest (Disgraceful) Court Decision on Trump’s Immigration Order

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Congress, Constitution, due process, Elena Kagan, executive order, Following Up, Immigration, Muslim ban, national security, presidency, refugees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Supreme Court, terrorism, travel ban, Trump, U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit, visas, Washington State

The decision last Thursday by a federal appeals court to uphold blockage of President Trump’s recent Executive Order on immigration and refugee policy exemplified the challenge I noted when I started blogging here at RealityChek: “So much nonsense out there, so little time….” Just as I often struggle each day to decide which outrage in the public policy world against fact-based, adult thinking should be addressed, I’ve struggled to decide which sad excuses for a legal argument made by three appellate judges in the Ninth Circuit to focus on in this post.

But two groups of contentions stand out as especially dangerous and disingenuous. Both decisively influenced the judges’ determination to keep the Executive Order from being enforced on procedural grounds pending a further judicial decision on the merits of the case.

The first is the panel’s unanimous ruling on how much due process to protect Constitutionally guaranteed rights is legally deserved by foreigners outside America’s borders who have not been awarded legal resident status. That is, how many boxes do the relevant U.S. officials need to check in order to reach a legally valid decision to deny a refugee applicant admission? In these refugee cases, the Supreme Court has held that the only such obligation is providing a “facially legitimate and bona fide” reason for a judgment reached by a State Department consular officer.

The Ninth Circuit panel, however, claims that this standard (and the already established appeals process) is insufficient when refugee applicants “have a relationship with a U.S. resident or an institution that might have rights of its own to assert.” And it has ruled that the Trump Executive Order failed to meet this standard.

Even leaving aside the convincing argument that existing law denies judges jurisdiction over immigration policy (which the panel rejected in a “preliminary” sense), just consider the precedent this conclusion would set. It would mean that unless a terrorist connection could be proved conclusively, a suspected ISIS fighter or adherent who applies for refugee or other immigration status from Iraq or Yemen or wherever could be entitled to enter the United States if he or she was a relative of a non-citizen legal U.S. resident. What would conclusive proof be? Heaven knows, since the case referenced by the Ninth Circuit panel only alleged that the rejection in question wasn’t sufficiently “detailed.” And who would decide how much detail is enough? Perhaps a U.S. court? Perhaps after looking over intelligence findings that are often unavoidably judgment calls? It’s hard to imagine a better way to start turning making a sieve of screening procedures vital in an age of transnational terrorism for protecting national security.

Think I’m kidding? Here are the actual circumstances of the immigration denial decision that the Ninth Circuit apparently finds so objectionable (and which was upheld in 2014 by the Supreme Court): An Afghan-born legal resident of the United States petitioned for her husband’s entry from Afghanistan, and asserted he deserved “priority (and judicially reviewable) status” like other “immediate relatives.”

And the basis for her claim that this application was unjustly turned down – i.e., that her petition was denied due process because the rationale wasn’t sufficiently detailed? A consular official told her husband that he would be kept out of America because by his own admission, he had been an official in Afghanistan’s former Taliban government, and that U.S. law aims to exclude foreigners who have engaged in “terrorist activities” – a description that certainly applies to the Taliban.

It gets better: The federal court that did decide that a former admitted Taliban official’s application deserved (unspecified) further consideration, which resulted in the case being appealed to the Supreme Court? It was the Ninth Circuit. And four Supreme Court Justices (Stephen Breyer, who wrote a dissent, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, who joined with him) agreed.

The second especially disturbing aspect of the appellate court’s decision was the panel’s claim that it had, in accordance with “an uncontroversial principle that is well-grounded in our jurisprudence,” paid “substantial deference to the immigration and national security policy determinations of the political branches” – that is, the presidency and the Congress. The only such deference apparent in this decision is at the level of brazen tokenism.

Specifically, the three judges claimed to agree that “the Government’s interest in combating terrorism is an urgent objective of the highest order.” But they also stated that the judiciary has a responsibility to balance this interest with other legitimate considerations, namely the public’s interest in “free flow of travel, in avoiding separation of families, and in freedom from discrimination.”

The “freedom from discrimination” threat of course pertains to repeated charges – also made in court by plaintiff Washington State – that the Executive Order’s refugee provisions create a “Muslim ban.” The Order’s failure to include most countries with Muslim majorities renders that charge inexplicable. Moreover, as my previous post observed, religious persecution is one of the forms of persecution that must be demonstrated by successful refugee applicants. But what’s simply jaw-dropping is the nature of the specific balancing act the appellate court identified involving national security concerns on the one hand, and freedom of travel and keeping families together on the other.

Because here’s what the three-judge panel asserted could nullify national security judgments made by the president and Congress (in the 2015 law identifying the seven countries subjected to the travel ban as “countries of concern” requiring special screening). And P.S.: It’s also what the judges agreed (in line with claims by Washington State and Minnesota) constituted enough “damage” to the State’s “economy and public universities” even to rise to the level of adjudicability in the context of immigration policy:

>”two visiting scholars who had planned to spend time at Washington State University were not permitted to enter the United States”:

>”three prospective employees from countries covered by the Executive Order for visas [for whom the University of Washington] had made plans [to arrive] beginning in February 2017”;

>”two medicine and science interns who have been prevented by the Executive Order from coming to the University of Washington”; and

>”an unspecified number of “students and faculty at Minnesota’s public universities [who] were similarly restricted from traveling for academic and personal reasons.”

If this is a balancing act, it’s one with a heavy Ninth Circuit thumb giving critical mass to laughably marginal considerations – even assuming that any of these temporarily inconvenienced students and teachers have any preexisting right to crossing American borders.

It’s true that lawyers and judges often insist that “no issue is decided finally until it is decided correctly.” But the Trump Executive Order’s treatment so far in the judiciary, and the current make-up of the Supreme Court, tell me that national security could suffer greatly until this result is finally reached.

Im-Politic: Of Course Trump’s Immigration Order is Legal

Tags

Charles Dickens, Constitution, executive order, Im-Politic, Immigration, Immigration Act of 1924, Immigration Act of 1965, Middle East, Muslims, refugees, terrorism, travel ban, Trump

Charles Dickens famously observed that the law can be an “ass” and an “idiot.” A slightly different conclusion is warranted from the blowup over the legality and Constitutionality of the ban imposed by President Trump via Executive Order (EO) on travel from seven Middle Eastern countries The real asses and idiots are those who are turning logical and common-sensical cartwheels trying to show that the courts should overturn the ban – along with the suspension of refugee admissions.

The proceedings generated so far by the Trump EO have revolved mainly around procedural questions – like whether states like Washington are entitled to bring suits challenging actions in areas like immigration that are federal government preserves, and whether the administration should have taken matters to an appellate court rather than staying in the district court that issued the restraining order blocking implementation of the ban. And these questions are all important. (This New York Times analysis of the oral arguments before the appellate court yesterday, however, could not make clearer the judges’ interest in substantive issues like whether the countries in question really do pose threats to U.S. national security).

Still, it’s altogether possible that the fate of the ban – and future such measures – ultimately will turn on an apparent contradiction in U.S. immigration law. On the one hand, the 1952 modification of the 1924 Immigration Act holds that:

“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”

On the other hand, a 1965 amendment to the law prohibits barring immigration on the basis of race, sex, nationality or place of birth. So that would seem to prevent the Trump administration from blocking entry by inhabitants of designated countries.

But resolving the conflict requires nothing more than engaging in thought. For obviously, the aim of the 1965 amendment was to remove the stain of racial, religious, and other forms of prejudice from American immigration policy. Until then, inflows had been governed by a series of quotas based on the national origins of the U.S. population as of 1890 – which of course was overwhelmingly from the white northern and western European countries. For good measure, immigration from Asia was completely eliminated.

Just as obviously, the Trump EO in question has nothing to do with such irrational – and intrinsically noxious – discrimination. It’s based on a national security judgment – the seven countries affected by the (temporary) travel ban have been classified by the previous administration and by Congress as lands where a “foreign terrorist organization has a significant presence,” where terrorists enjoy a “safe haven,” or where the government “has repeatedly provided support of acts of international terrorism.”

The seven countries singled out are Muslim majority countries – one reason evidently leading opponents to describe the ban as a “Muslim ban.” But the travel ban’s strikingly limited purview easily debunks that claim. As many of these opponents have also noted, travel from dozens of Muslim majority countries is completely unaffected. It’s true that these (massive) exceptions may make the EO either inconsistent or incompetent. Or both. But judges are not supposed to rule on such grounds, especially where foreign policy is concerned. The large number of un-banned Muslim majority countries is also plainly much more important in determining the administration’s intent than statements made by the president, or by his advisers, during his campaign for the White House.

Moreover, Mr. Trump’s immigration critics seem to have forgotten that, when refugee admissions are resumed (after 120 days), the relevant U.S. law will not only permit but require an explicitly religious test in part. For persecution based on religion is one of the forms of persecution refugee applicants must demonstrate to gain entry.

Finally, as noted in the TIME article linked above, even the 1965 immigration policy change contains a provision that could justify the Trump administration measures. It “allows the president to deny anybody entry to the U.S. under special circumstances.” Sure, anyone can question whether current circumstances qualify. And Congress has every right to propose and pass amendments that would describe these circumstances more precisely. But for the time being, they are the law of the land, and by definition the President has used his judgment to craft a response. If the judiciary can challenge judgments like this willy nilly, why on earth do we bother holding elections for president?

Im-Politic: The Needless New Immigration Policy Mess

Tags

American Muslims, Center for Immigration Studies, Department of Homeland Security, DHS, Egypt, Executive Orders, green card holders, Im-Politic, Immigration, Muslims, Norman Matloff, Obama, Pakistan, refugees, Saudi Arabia, September 11, Syria, terrorism, Trump

The last 48 hours’ flow of immigration policy-related news has been unprecedented – or certainly nearly so. To me, the big takeaway is clear: In the course of developing and announcing a fundamentally sound policy framework for handling immigration- and refugee-related national security issues, the Trump administration has allowed vague and/or confusing provisions to create an unnecessary political firestorm.

The needless confusion stemmed mainly from the apparent treatment of green card holders in the Executive Order on “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.”  These individuals have been granted permanent resident legal status by the U.S. government, and have extensively vetted. Perhaps that’s why the Order makes no specific mention of them.    

Yet early yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) seemed to confirm that the Orders’s 90-day ban on entry into the United States from seven Muslim-majority countries deemed (correctly) to be hotbeds of terrorism and/or Islamic extremism includes green card holders.  

Both moves seemed so mystifying that my first reaction was skepticism. Particularly fishy to me was the source of the DHS statement. It came from a department spokesperson identified by name. But she was described as “acting,”and given that we’re still in the new administration’s earliest days, it was legitimate to wonder where she got her information and whether it’s accurate. And indeed, shortly afterwards, “senior administration officials” (who oddly remained nameless) were saying that the green card measures would be administered on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, this sequence of events doesn’t speak well at all for the togetherness of the new administration’s act.

But there’s no reasonable doubt that much of the tumult that’s surrounded the rest of the Trump immigration moves is nothing more than another outburst of stealth chattering class support for Open Borders policies. This charge is justified for at least two reasons:

First, the notion that Trump’s refugee measures represent a wholesale trashing of America’s humanitarian heritage is juvenile at best and reckless and ignorant (or both) at worst. The Trump-haters who have claiming that the Statue of Liberty is weeping and the like seem to be ignoring how even Barack Obama severely limited refugee admissions from war-torn Syria – to 10,000 in 2016. The previous year, only 1,800 were resettled. And clearly reflecting security concerns, the screening process typically took between 18 and 24 months.

Why didn’t President Obama simply open America’s doors much wider and faster to the immiserated Syrian hordes? Because even he recognized that the nation’s most fundamental self-interest – the safety of its existing citizens and legal residents – can’t be brushed aside even in the face of the most terrible tragedies.

President Trump and many others doubted, however, that even this screening was adequate. And they could point to copious compelling evidence. Principally, mass Middle East refugee admissions have in Europe have included terrorists involved in deadly attacks. In the United States, children of recent Middle East refugees or other immigrants have been responsible for the shootings and bombings in Orlando, Florida; San Bernardino, California, Boston, and Fort Hood. And Muslim residents have been involved (including arrested) in terrorism attempts in numbers vastly higher than their share of the overall American population.

Combine this with the virtual impossibility of getting accurate, reliable records from virtually destroyed countries or thoroughly failed states, and the real question before Americans is not why President Trump has banned entry of any kind from these lands, but why broad restrictions have taken so long to impose.

Second, it’s been frequently argued (including by President Obama) that even if refugees can be tied to terrorist attacks, the numbers of Americans killed have been infinistesimal. In particular, they’re fond of noting that the odds are lower than getting killed in bathroom accidents or everyday activities like driving.

What they keep missing, of course, is the completely different role of government negligence – and therefore preventability or avoidability – involved. Fatal accidents at home, for example, can often be avoided by moving with greater care, or more properly maintaining fixtures or appliances, or keeping clutter off the floor, or in numerous other ways. It’s also entirely possible to increase your chances of surviving your daily auto commute to work – by driving more defensively, by caring for your vehicle, by staying off the road in bad weather, etc.

Will these precautions guarantee your protection 100 percent? Of course not. In particular, they can’t completely remove the related elements of randomness and chance from life – tripping over a hard-to-see uneven stretch of pavement, sharing a road with a drunk driver, or flying in an airplane disabled by a flock of birds, experiencing a natural disaster, etc. Speaking of that last item, I would include in this category a decision like moving to or staying an earthquake-prone location, especially if relocating is a relatively easy option – though the element of randomness there is more debatable.

But reasonable people seem to accept these kinds of inevitable bad breaks. They understand the irrationality of shutting themselves in at home, for example, to stay safe. As for injuries or fatalities resulting from violence perpetrated by individuals admitted to the United States by a policy decision that ignores or downplays well known risks – they’re dramatically and unacceptably different. For there is nothing random about them; indeed, every last one of them was completely preventable. They’re the products of elected leaders who believe that the loss of American lives – in situations well short of war – are acceptable risks to run in exchange for benefits that, to put it kindly, are intangible (e.g., winning good will abroad), speculative (e.g., impeding recruitment by terrorist groups), or subjective (conforming with American values), or some combination of the two.

It’s certainly arguable that the previous administration was well within its rights in making those judgments and decisions. President Obama, after all, was legitimately elected – twice. But it’s just as arguable that Donald Trump’s White House victory owed in part to the public’s rejection of these calculations.

Having said this, at least two more aspects of the new Trump refugee policies are disturbing. First, why were countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Pakistan excluded – especially given the role of Saudis and Egyptians in the September 11 attacks cited explicitly by the Executive Order, and the role of Pakistan’s state security forces in supporting a wide range of terrorist activities, including strikes on U.S. Forces and facilities in Afghanistan?

Second, the Executive Order, in my view, admirably seeks to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” But for precisely the same vetting-related reasons that it’s excruciatingly difficult to make sure that Syrians (and other Middle Easterners) aren’t terrorists or other dangerous types, it’s going to be equally difficult to figure out who’s a member of a persecuted religious minority and who isn’t.

I agree with President Trump that the previous U.S. refugee policy created too many unnecessary security risks, and also that temporary freezes and bans and the like in general are needed to enable his administration to develop a detailed alternative – including better vetting procedures . I also admire the vigor with which Mr. Trump has plunged into the presidency. But in the case of this Executive Order, it looks like too much haste might have needlessly created serious problems today, and the potential for more down the road.

Im-Politic: No Learning Curve for America’s Left on Immigration

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American Muslims, Angela Merkel, assimilation, Attorney General, Cory Booker, Democrats, Elizabeth Warren, Germany, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jeff Sessions, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, liberals, Marketwatch.com, Muslims, national security, Obama, Open Borders, progressive, Social Democratic Party, terrorism, Trump, United Kingdom

I keep waiting for America’s self-styled progressives to start recognizing that they’re going absolutely nowhere in national politics until they abandon their devotion to Open Borders policies, and start responding to their fellow citizens’ legitimate economic and especially security concerns about mass immigration.

Sadly, nothing could be clearer from recent developments than that the wait will continue indefinitely. Even worse, the U.S. Left seems to be even more clueless on the subject than its counterparts in Europe.

Certainly President Obama remains unrepentant about his own record. In his Farewell Address, he touted his record in fighting Islamic terrorism overseas (not that he used the term), and warned against the dangers of domestic radicalization. But his boast that “no foreign terrorist organization has successfully planned and executed an attack on our homeland these past eight years” once again made painfully clear his neglect of the dangerous impact of already having admitting so many newcomers whose original religion or culture creates huge obstacles to successful assimilation into American society. Why else would he have glossed over the deadly attacks by Muslim immigrants in Boston, San Bernardino, and Orlando?

In fact, according to Mr. Obama, the only Americans who need to learn about current and emerging immigration realities are those in the native-born population – because their fear that some immigrants today could “destroy the fundamental character” of the country is not only obsolete, but bigoted.

Other progressives also seem to be doubling down on efforts to address valid immigration concerns with smears. Can anyone reasonably doubt, for example, that Alabama Republican Senator Jeff Sessions’ appointment as President-elect Trump’s Attorney General would be sailing through the Senate if had not so forthrightly championed immigration realism – and enforcing the nation’s existing laws?

Yes, many Senate Democrats have accused Sessions of harboring racist views and neglecting the rights of a wide variety of discrimination victims. At the same time, none of these alleged transgressions prevented New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker – Sessions’ leading Congressional opponent – from feeling “blessed and honored” just last year “to have partnered with Sen. Sessions in being the Senate sponsors” of a Congressional Gold Medal for the voting rights activists of the 1960s. No one else in the Senate protested, either.

Maybe Booker’s Massachusetts Senate colleague, Elizabeth Warren, is moving in the opposite direction? Not if her declaration that she’s running for reelection is any indication. Warren marked the occasion by vowing to “fight back against attacks on Latinos, African-Americans, Muslims, immigrants, women, and LGBT Americans. Our diversity is what makes our country strong – and on this, there will be NO compromise.” As if all these groups can be lumped in the exact same victimization category.

In fact, the only sign of progress I can detect is that no progressives are urging Mr. Obama or Mr. Trump to quintuple the number of U.S. refugee admissions from war-wracked Middle Eastern countries – as failed Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton proposed.

The contrast with European progressive leaders is stunning. As reported in an insightful column on Marketwatch.com, the head of Germany’s Social Democratic Party – and the country’s vice chancellor in the current coalition government – is calling for “ncreased video surveillance…a ban on fundamentalist mosques as breeding grounds for terrorism, and…an end to freeloading on Germany’s generous child-support subsidies by other European Union citizens.”

Another German progressive leader has slammed Chancellor Angela Merkel for “uncontrolled border opening [and]a police force that has been downsized to the point of inefficiency, that neither has the personnel nor the technical resources that would enable it to cope with the current threat situation,”

Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn, who heads the United Kingdom’s struggling Labour Party, is unmistakably rethinking his former opposition to Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in large part because of the grouping’s lax immigration policies. Corbyn had previously opposed “Brexit,” which British voters passed in a referendum in June.

Germany, of course, has experienced Muslim terrorist attacks much bloodier than America’s. The Labour Party seems headed for its worst showing in Parliament since the 1930s. Will it take these kinds of security and political disasters to bring U.S. progressives to their senses on immigration?

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Sense and Nonsense on Russia’s Hacking

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2016 election, Amy Klochubar, China, cyber-security, cyber-war, defense spending, Democrats, hacking, Hillary Clinton, intelligence, John McCain, Middle East, NATO, Obama, Office of Personnel Management, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Putin, Republicans, Russia, sanctions, terrorism, Trump

What could be more predictable? The growing uproar over charges that Russia’s government waged a cyber-focused disinformation campaign to influence the last U.S. presidential election has let loose a flood of positively inane statements and arguments on both sides that show politics at its absolute worst.

Even worse, unless both Democrats and Republicans – and the various conflicting camps within the two major parties – get their act together quickly, the odds of further attacks and all the damage they can cause to American governance will only keep shooting up.

Let’s start with those who have expressed skepticism about these allegations, including regarding the substance of yesterday’s intelligence community report concluding that “President Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine confidence in the democratic process, denigrate [former] Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton [the Democratic nominee], and harm her electability and potential presidency.”

Can they really be serious in contending that the intelligence agencies’ publicly expressed judgments don’t pass the credibility test because no smoking gun or any other compelling evidence has been published? Do they really want the CIA etc to reveal whatever human and technical sources and methods they rely on? Do they really believe that any effective counter-hacking strategy can be developed or continued after disclosing that information?

The insistence on definitive proof, moreover, amounts to terrible advice for making foreign and national security policy generally. It seeks to apply to the jungle realm of international affairs the standards of the American legal system. President Obama’s years in office should have taught Americans how dangerously childish it is to believe that relations among sovereign countries are governed by commonly agreed on rules and norms, that the world is on the verge of this beatific state of affairs, or even that significant progress is being made. And Americans should hold shadowy world of spying and counter-spying to a simon-pure standard?

A more defensible rationale for doubting the intelligence community’s work emphasizes its past major blunders. And from what’s been made public, they have indeed been all too common and all too troubling.  (Please keep in mind, though, that successes often cannot be made public.)

Nevertheless, if a president or president-elect has no faith in a high confidence judgment of this importance from his intelligence agencies, then it’s clearly time to clean house. If the next administration does indeed decisively reject the community’s work on this matter, it will have no legitimate choice but to replace it leaders.

Back to the genuinely ditzy positions: statements that the Russian hacking failed to influence the course of the election. I personally believe this, and shame on those partisans who keep insisting that this interference prevented former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from winning the White House or that it delegitimizes to any extent Donald Trump’s victory.

But should the United States count on Moscow – or any other actor – continuing to fail? Should it wait to respond forcefully until a U.S. adversary succeeds? Shouldn’t Washington capitalize on its adversaries’ current evident shortcomings in this regard and focus on punishment and deterrence? Simply posing these questions should make clear how obvious the answers are.

A final major objection to hammering the Russians represents another more reasonable judgment call, but it’s still fatally flawed. It’s the argument that Washington needs to softpedal the hack attack because the United States has a vital interest in improving relations with Moscow.

As I’ve written, opportunities for better ties with Russia abound, and they should be pursued. But that’s no reason to let Moscow off lightly for its cyber-aggression. In the first place, in any mutually beneficial relationship, boundaries need to be drawn. This is especially true given how much stronger and wealthier than Russia the United States is. If an effort to subvert America’s democratic processes doesn’t qualify, count on further, even worse provocations by Moscow.

Just as important, this approach overlooks a crucial reality: Clear indications that Russia has an incentive to cooperate with the United States in fighting Islamic extremism and terrorism haven’t appeared because Moscow is in a charitable, or even helpful, mood. They’ve appeared because these are vital interests as well for Russia, which both borders the dysfunctional Middle East and rules over its own Muslim populations.

In other words, Moscow has plenty of incentive to play ball with Washington on the Middle East whether the United States retaliates sharply for the hacking or not. And if the Russians don’t understand that, then there’s little hope of any form of meaningful cooperation.

Yet the actual and potential inconsistencies and hypocrisies of those urging tough retaliatory measures are equally troubling. Some are exclusive to Democrats. For example, the sanctions imposed on Moscow by the Obama administration for the hacking seem pretty modest for actions that it claims “demonstrated a significant escalation” of Russia’s “longstanding” efforts “to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order.”

And at the same time, the outrage voiced at Moscow contrasts conspicuously with reactions to China’s successful attack on the federal Office of Personnel Management, in which the records of some 22 million U.S. government employees – including classified and confidential information – were compromised. Indeed, President Obama never publicly blamed China’s government nor announced any responses.

Most important, however, is the question of whether Russia hardliners in both major parties old and new will act on the logical implications of their views of Russian actions and intentions – including on Moscow’s efforts to expand its influence along its own European borders. If for instance the hacking, as per Arizona Republican Senator John McCain, is truly an “act of war,” then will the call go out to cut off economic and diplomatic relations with Moscow?

If Russia’s moves against Crimea or Ukraine or the Baltics mean, in the words of Minnesota liberal Democratic Senator Amy Klochubar, that “Our commitment to NATO is more important than ever,” will today’s hawks – especially the noveau liberal variety – call for more U.S. defense spending and bigger American military deployments in endangered countries? And will they demand that American treaty allies in Europe finally get serious collectively about contributing to the common defense – which is first and foremost their own defense?

The answers to these questions will speak volumes to the American people as to whether their government is truly determined to defend interests declared to be major against foreign threats. And you can be sure they’ll convey the same vital information to America’s foreign friends and foes, too.

Our So-Called Foreign Policy: New Year, New President…New Anti-Terrorism Policy?

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border security, Center for a New American Security, chattering classes, Daniel Benjamin, Daniel Henninger, foreign policy establishment, geopolitics, internationalism, ISIS, Middle East, neoconservatism, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Politico, terrorism, The Wall Street Journal, Trump

For me, one of the biggest reasons for optimism for 2017 is the election of a president ready and willing to kick over the obsolete crockery of American foreign policy and grand strategy. President-elect Trump still has to come up with his own comprehensive answers to the question, “What would come next?” His signature foreign policy speech of the campaign made that clear enough. It contained elements both of the genuine, nationalist, down-to-earth “America First” approach that I believe is urgently needed, and of the grandiose internationalist, even neoconservative blueprint that I believe must urgently be scrapped.

It’s entirely possible that this tension will complicate the new administration’s foreign policy for years to come. One reason is a simple as personnel. Because the nationalist bench is so thin, finding enough bodies to staff all the senior jobs that need to be filled will require Mr. Trump to rely on many conventional thinkers. Another has to do with the inherent difficulty of big transitions. Barring a catastrophe, they rarely happen overnight – and in many cases shouldn’t.

But because the challenge is so formidable, the overhaul effort can’t start too soon, and Americans have just received several reminders that the place to start is with fundamental geopolitics – and specifically, with my own observation that America’s immensely favorable location on the globe is an almost completely neglected diplomatic asset that Washington should try to capitalize and maximize, not seemingly intentionally squander. Put simply, those two oceans matter decisively, and coupled with the nation’s staggering treasure trove of resources and continental scale, argue compellingly for seeking progressively less, not more, global engagement. And as I’ve written, nowhere is this truer than regarding the fight against global terrorism.

In my view, little could be clearer or more promising for a geographically isolated country like the United States than the need to focus anti-ISIS etc efforts on keeping terrorists out of the country. Will a border enforcement-centric anti-terrorism policy work perfectly? Of course not. Is it a better bet for American security than pretending that even defeating ISIS will rid the dysfunctional Middle East of extremism forever, or even a few years? Or imagining that in any foreseeable future, that sad region can be turned into something other than a swamp for breeding more jihadism? That’s a total no-brainer.

But as indicated in a recent column by The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger, America’s chattering classes have a long way to go in learning this lesson. According to Henninger, the terrorist attacks that have hit the United States lately show that “This is what it means to live as a target. What are we going to do about it? Wrap ourselves in two protective oceans?”

Moreover, a Google search quickly turned up a May report by the Center for a New American Security that reminds how deeply ingrained in the bipartisan American foreign policy establishment this belief is. According to the authors – described as “an extraordinary [and thoroughly bipartisan] group of scholars, practitioners, and journalists”:

“The best way to ensure the longevity of a rules-based international system [itself kind of a dicey notion that desperately needs rethinking] favorable to U.S. interests is not to retreat behind two oceans, lower American standards, or raise the tolerance level for risk. The proper course is to extend American power and U.S. leadership in Asia, Europe, and the Greater Middle East….”

Nonetheless, some reasons for optimism appeared last year as well. One of the most notable: An essay in Politico by Daniel Benjamin – a former Obama administration counter-terrorism official. Writing in March, Benjamin observed sagely that “While the jihadist threat is genuinely global, it is by no means equally distributed. ”

And one main reason cited by the author?

“The United States still has the blessing of geography—two oceans that mean that outside extremists will need to fly to get here. As we found on Christmas Day 2009, when Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab tried to detonate his underwear on a flight bound for Detroit, our aviation security, no-fly lists and intelligence need constant updating. But we have made major strides. By contrast, Europe, with its weak external borders, nonexistent internal borders and a migrant crisis that has brought close to a million and a half migrants into its borders, faces multiplying perils.”

And although clearly the United States has decided to “fight the terrorists over there,” Benjamin perceptively observes that it’s also made notable progress securing the border:

“One big reason why the chances of a Brussels or Paris-like attack are lower here is that we’ve been working flat out to reduce the threat for almost 15 years, since 9/11. With one of the worst extremism problems in the West, Britain has gone hard at this as well. But the same cannot be said for our Continental cousins. The United States has spent upwards of $650 billion on homeland security since 9/11. No comparable European statistic exists, but judging by law enforcement, border security and other agency budgets, the overall figures are much lower.”

I’ve been careful to argue that these two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive, and that one form of military operation in the Middle East can contribute significantly to U.S. security – at least until border controls are even stronger. That’s a campaign of anti-ISIS harassment, conducted through the air and with special forces on the ground, aimed at keeping the group off balance enough to prevent the consolidation of an Afghanistan-like base for staging September 11-scale attacks.

A somewhat larger scale anti-ISIS effort has made important progress in disrupting the group’s capabilities over the last year. But the victory will be pyrhhic if takeovers of terrorist strongholds like Mosul and Raqqa generate claims of “mission accomplished.” Benjamin is right to warn against U.S. complacency. But that’s likeliest to be prevented if the hard, unglamorous, continuing work of better securing the border moves to center stage in Washington’s anti-terrorism policy.