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Comment by meritt | Hacker News Reader

> First, it's not a "ban". It's a temporary suspension until new vetting procedures are put in place.

A 90-day suspension and a ban are the same thing. ban is defined as "officially or legally prohibit." -- duration is irrelevant.

> Second, it's not "Muslim"

The executive order specifically exempts people of minority religions in those countries "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".

All of the countries in question have Islam as the primary religion. If it was targeting nationality only, they would not provide an exclusion for minority religions.

The ban is targeting Muslims (and only Muslims) of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

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You completely failed to address the OP's comment about the largest Muslim countries in the world (Indonesian and Pakistan) not being a part of the ban.

If Trump was targeting Muslims, wouldn't he have started there?

> If Trump was targeting Muslims, wouldn't he have started there?

He campaigned on a Muslim ban. Why try to randomly guess at his intentions, when he stated them over and over again, clear as day?

Let's focus here. The claim is this is a ban on Muslim's, yet the vast majority of Muslims in the world are unaffected.

It is a partial fulfillment of the goal Trump explicitly stated repeatedly during the campaign: "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the country".

He has taken a very large concrete step toward this outcome, explicitly and obviously in service of it. To claim otherwise requires both being obtuse about the wording and the belief that Trump won't do what he said he was going to do. After the events of the past week, the latter claim seems indefensible.

You're being selective in your quote of Trump. What he said was...

* “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.” *

That is a very different statement from you said.

We who oppose this ban are not opposing it because we think it will be permanent. We are not OK with a temporary ban either. (Few think that this xenophobic era of far right blood-and-soil nationalism will last forever, after all.)

That's your prerogative to oppose the ban.

However, stopping all immigration from countries that have been deemed "high risk" until the security of the US can be improved does not seem like an outrageous move to me.

There are a lot of people who will happily accept a temporary suspension of immigration from countries full of ISIS fighters who are trying to exploit our immigration system based on the president's word that the various security services need 90 days to tighten things up. There are a lot of people in this group who also will go out and protest if literally anything more aggressive is done from here (and who also vehemently opposed the original proposal during the campaign.)

The slippery slope fallacy falls short.

> There are a lot of people in this group who also will go out and protest

Trump, of all people, has given no indication at all that his policy decisions will be swayed by protest.

> The slippery slope fallacy falls short.

It's not a slippery slope when Trump said that a Muslim ban was what he was going to do! It's not "oh, he might bring up banning all Muslims from entering at this rate". He already said he wanted to do that. Explicitly.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/us-government-turned-a...

Not so clear to me:

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/13/politics/donald-trump-muslim-b...

He seemed to backtrack. At this point in May he even called it temporary.

Perhaps because he has business interests there? Pakistan is particularly interesting because the San Bernadino shooters were from there. Saudi Arabia is also not on the list, despite being the home of Wahabist terrorism. I'm totally against the ban, but these inconsistencies are revealing.

http://www.usatoday.com/videos/news/nation/2017/01/26/countr...

The inconsistent treatment of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia is bipartisan and predates Trump's presidency by a long time. Remember how a number of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and their role was basically ignored? How the Saudis donated large sums to the Clinton Foundation? How we've provided large sums of military aid to Pakistan since 2001?

Flipping the question, if it's against extremism then where is Saudi Arabia on the list? How can you invoke 9/11 as your justification and not have Saudi on the list?

> The executive order specifically exempts people of minority religions in those countries

I'm sorry, but are you actually upset by a provision that makes an exception for those being actively persecuted because of their religion?

Regardless of what you may think of the executive order, I'm not sure how you can find fault in that.

I'm not taking a stance here, I'm using facts to prove that this ban is targeting Muslims (and only Muslims) of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen.

But not Muslims from the 189 remaining countries. So maybe it's not, in fact, about Islam per se? Do you think there is such a possibility?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_by_country

It's about Muslims (and only Muslims) from the 7 listed countries. I'm not sure how to make this any more clear.

> It's about Muslims (and only Muslims) from the 7 listed countries.

Emphasis mine. Why those 7 countries specifically though? Anything special about them?

We don't have close economic dependencies on them?

No. We're actively bombing the shit out of them using drones and have been for a while. All except Iran, I think that one is there to send a message.

All the banned people are Muslim, but not all Muslims are banned.

Person who enacted the ban campaigned on banning Muslims. Perhaps it's not some sort of big coincidence.

> Emphasis mine. Why those 7 countries specifically though? Anything special about them?

I dunno. Is there?

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/27/us/politics/refugee-musli...

"The visa-issuance process plays a crucial role in detecting individuals with terrorist ties and stopping them from entering the United States. Perhaps in no instance was that more apparent than the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001"

So the EO cites September 11 and other terrorist attacks. Yet most of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia. Why is it not on this list?

> Yet most of the 9/11 attackers came from Saudi Arabia. Why is it not on this list?

Regarding those attacks, Al Qaeda deliberately sourced the majority of the attackers from Saudi Arabia because the strategy at the time was to drive a wedge between that country and the USA.

The response to that tactic was quite clever, between April and August 2003 the USA moved its based military forces from Saudia Arabia to Bahrain. On the face of it this seemed to meet one of Al Qaeda's primary demands and seemed to validate their choice of attackers' nationality, but it actually served the Saudi Royals very well in that it pulled the rug from under those in their country who were leaning towards Al Qaeda's message of 'occupation'.

The USA and KSA still have very cordial relations so there's no realy surprise as to why it's not on the list.

Then there's that oil thing.

Is ISIS trying to export fighters through Saudi Arabia? Perhaps there are other constraints we have in our relationship with Saudi Arabia that would prevent such a ban? Perhaps this would be a bad move diplomatically? I'm sure if you think hard you can probably come up with more reasons, but I don't think you're interested in it, you just want to try to point out hypocracy. Or, maybe you are suggesting that the suspension did not go far enough?

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