The rally was co-organised by the Foundation For Ethnic Understanding and the Nusantara Foundation in response to the uncertainty and anxiety created by Trump’s now-rescinded executive order to bar citizens from the seven Muslim-majority nations.
The ‘I am a Muslim Too’ solidarity rally drew several thousand people who raised slogans and held banners of ‘Love Trumps Hate’ and ‘USA, USA’ and ‘No Muslim Ban’.

Headlined by American entrepreneur and author Russell Simmons and actress Susan Sarandon, the rally yesterday saw participation by several faith leaders who denounced the divisive political environment in the country and called on Americans to stand up for Muslims facing increasing threat and pressure.

Addressing the rally, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said America was founded to respect all faiths and all beliefs and stereotypes against the Muslim community has to be dispelled.

“The message I want to give as Mayor of the city to everyone regardless of background or faith or where you were born is that this is your city and this is your country,” he said.
 

The Mayor said America was founded by people who were fleeing religious persecution and was founded to respect all faiths and all beliefs.

“This is who we are as Americans and this must be protected. An attack on anybody’s faith is an attack on all people of faith,” he said.

Lauding the 900 Muslim members of the New York Police Department, de Blasio said the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world are “overwhelming peace loving” people who care about their community.

“We have to dispel the stereotypes” faced by the Muslim community, de Blasio said declaring at the end of his speech that “I’m proud to say today I’m a Muslim too”.

Eminent Sikh-American speaker and activist Simran Jeet Singh said he is supporting the rally “because as a Sikh, we know what discrimination and oppression feels like. We want a world that is acceptable and tolerant”.

Sarandon said given the political environment in the country, it is no longer possible to be neutral. “If you are silent, then you are complacent.

“We are here because we will not be a cog in a machine that is dismantling our constitution, that is dismantling our bills of rights,” she said to loud cheers from the crowd.

Sarandon added that New Yorkers should tell their representatives that the city is “open and accepting”.

“We will fight hatred with love, we will fight bigotry with inclusivity. And today I am a Muslim too,” she said.

American-Muslim woman Latisha James said she was proud to be part of the solidarity rally that was sending a strong message that people are coming together to support the community and will not tolerate discrimination against its members.

“Everyone is of the same nature. There should be no discrimination, we are all the same. We all migrated to America so for Trump to put a ban on Muslims and refugees is not appropriate. It s not going to happen,” she said.

She said a lot of Muslims and refugees have been discriminated against and “it’s good that everyone has come together finally to support the Muslims”.
 

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“We will win that battle. The unfortunate part is that it takes time statutorily, but we will win that battle. We also have a lot of other options, including just filing a brand new order,” Trump told reporters travelling with him on Air Force One from Andrews Air Force Base to Florida.

Asked if his plan might be to issue a new executive order, Trump said: “It very well could be. We need speed for reasons of security, so it very well could be.”

Trump said that “in honour of the (9th US Circuit court) decision” he will likely wait until next week to respond with any action.

“Perhaps Monday or Tuesday,” he said.

The new executive order on immigration would include security measures, Trump said.

“New security measures. We have very, very strong vetting. I call it extreme vetting and we’re going very strong on security. We are going to have people coming to our country that want to be here for good reason,” he said.

Speaking at the White House Trump said: “We will be doing something very rapidly to do with the additional security for our country. You’ll be seeing that sometime next week,”

“In addition, we will continue to go through the court process and ultimately, I have no doubt we will win that particular case,” Trump told reporters during a joint news conference yesterday with the visiting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

“We are going to keep our country safe. We are going to do whatever is necessary to keep our country safe. We have had decision which we think will be very successful with, it shouldn’t have taken this much time because safety is a primary reason,” Trump said.

“One of the reasons I am standing here today, the security of our country, the voters felt I would give it the best security,” he said indicating that, despite the court setback, he would continue with his efforts for the safety and security of the US.

“While I’ve been President, which is just for a very short period of time, I’ve learned tremendous things that you could only learn, frankly, if you were in a certain position, namely President,” he said.

Trump said there are tremendous threats to the country.

“We will not allow that to happen, I can tell you that right now. So we’ll be going forward and we’ll be doing things to continue to make our country safe. It will happen rapidly and we will not allow people into our country who are looking to do harm to our people,” he said.

defibrillator, oxygen cylinders, intubating laryngoscopes and other safety drugs.

Eman is being transported by a fully equipped truck, which will be followed by an ambulance and a police escort to Saifee Hospital where a special room has been created for her.

Meanwhile Trump declined to respond to a report in Washington Post that his National Security Advisor General (rtd) Flynn discussed sanctions with Russia’s Ambassador to the US before he was sworn in as National Security Advisor.

Trump said he was not aware of the report.

“I don’t know about that. I haven’t seen it. What report is that? I haven’t seen that. I’ll look into that,” the President said.

He cautioned Iran when he was asked how he plans to respond to Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who had earlier said that any nation that threatens Iran will “regret” it.

“He better be careful,” Trump said.
 

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Credit: Fibonacci Blue / Flickr. Some rights reserved.

In November 2015, Asma Jama, a Somali-born woman living in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, was waiting for her pasta alfredo at Applebee’s, chatting in Swahili with her family, when she was confronted by Jodie Burchard-Risch. Burchard-Risch demanded that Jama speak English or go home. Then, she smashed her beer mug in Jama’s face.

The attack was shocking and made national news. This past December, Jama spoke at the sentencing hearing for Burchard-Risch, who pleaded guilty to third-degree assault and will serve six months in jail. Jama recounted the fear she lives with after the attack, saying she no longer goes anywhere alone. Still, she spoke words of kindness to the woman who showed her none. “In front of everybody here,” Jama told the packed courtroom, “I forgive you. And I hope that you choose love over hate.”

Minnesota is home to the nation's largest Somali population. And like so many Muslim communities throughout the United States, Minnesota Somalis are organizing to combat the Islamophobia stoked by Trump. The Minnesota Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MN) plans to activate 10,000 Minnesotans using a three-part strategy grounded in the belief that people will, when given a chance, choose respect and understanding instead of fear, following Jama’s example of rejecting hate.

CAIR-MN plans to use a combination of traditional organizing tactics and new outreach efforts to communities not historically engaged in this fight.

Successfully engaging thousands of people to fight Islamophobia depends on an understanding that Jaylani Hussein, executive director of CAIR-MN, laid out to about 60 Somali and non-Somali activists in late December. “Most Americans agree there is something wrong with how we are treating American Muslims,” Hussein said. “They know something is wrong, even if they cannot identify it.” As Trump’s presidency approached, Hussein told the room, “They know they’ve got to do something about it.”

Muslims expect American Islamophobia to intensify under Trump, and Somali Americans expect to be on the front line.

The Somali-American community had been the target of institutionalized Islamophobia prior to the campaign and subsequent election of Donald Trump. “The Somali community in Minnesota was at the blunt end of Islamophobia before this election,” says Hussein. “But it is a phenomenon that has outgrown all previous levels.”

Somalis in Minnesota are targeted.
The U.S. Census Bureau data estimates there are 40,000 Somali-speaking residents in Minnesota. Underreporting to the U.S. Census Bureau is common, though, and by some accounts, the number of Somalis—including resettled refugees, inter-state migrants, and native U.S.-born residents—could be twice as high. While Somali Americans have planted deep roots in the state, starting thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations, opening schools and mosques around the Twin Cities metro area and beyond, tension between the state’s largest Muslim population and native Minnesotans has risen in recent years.
The uncertainty and tension felt by Somalis result in part from the Somali identity inhabiting multiple American fault lines. Imam Hassan Mohamud put it bluntly: “We are Black. We are immigrants. We are Muslims.”

Mohamud, Imam at the Minnesota Da’Wah Institute, spoke at a recent anti-Islamophobia meeting, where he explained how Somali Americans feel the harsh rhetoric against Muslims, the anti-refugee rhetoric in general, and racism against African Americans. The compounding effect of this racism and Islamophobia has left Somalis feeling specifically targeted.

Last April, a Minnesota man crossed the border to Grand Forks, North Dakota, where he burned down a Somali-owned restaurant. The same month, former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman wrote an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star Tribune intending to address the number of Twin Cities-based individuals who returned to Somalia to fight in that nation’s civil war. In the piece, Coleman labeled Minnesota “ground zero” for radical Islamic terrorism and called out “a specific population—Somalis.” The letter was titled “The Land of 10,000 Terrorists.”

Perhaps the biggest source of concern in the Somali community—and the one that makes Somalis feel uniquely targeted by the U.S. government—is a Department of Justice program called Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). The program is meant to root out radicalization and extremism on U.S. soil, but it has led to controversy and fear among Somali Muslims. Mohamud and Hussein both agree that CVE’s policy of offering money into a resource-starved population in exchange for information about activities taking place within the community has left the Somali community divided. Muslim support for CVE is rare, Hussein explained, but many are in a position where they need to choose the money over their opposition to the program.

According to Mohamud and Hussein, CVE imbeds Islamophobia into government policy. “The program’s very premise is Islamophobic,” Hussein points out. It targets one community, Somali Americans, and builds suspicion that any individual in that community might be a source of radical extremism. That’s “the playbook of the Islamophobia network,” Hussein says, and it affirms the principle that Somali Americans are a threat to America.

This was the tense landscape in Minnesota even before Donald Trump arrived at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Nov. 6, two days before his election, to address his supporters. Trump said, “A disaster is taking place in Minnesota” as a result of lax vetting in refugee resettlement, “with very large numbers of Somali refugees coming into your state without your knowledge, without your support or approval.”

Trump didn’t refer specifically to the stabbing at a mall in St. Cloud, Minnesota, nor to the ISIS trial in which nine men were tried for providing support to the terrorist organization. But the message that he did share was clear: The Somali community as a whole is a threat to Minnesota. “You’ve suffered enough,” he told the crowd.

Building a strategy toward understanding.
CAIR-MN’s overall strategy to fight Islamophobia is rooted in Asma Jama’s story of violence and forgiveness. She “has the literal scars (of Islamophobia) on her face,” and could have retreated after her attack, says Hussein. “But she chose love instead of fear.”

The first part of the strategy is to make conversations about Islam easier for everyone by “training the trainers.” CAIR-MN will provide the preparation for people to accurately combat the misinformation and fear used to perpetuate Islamophobia. Then, the trainers can talk to those who might be susceptible to that fear, those who have little contact with Muslims and are unfamiliar with Islam.

Islamophobia feeds on small pieces of misinformation that build a case for fear, says Hussein. That strategy succeeds because “people make decisions based on what they feel” and not what is true about Islam or Muslims.

The second part is to share success stories of the Somali community with non-Muslim Minnesotans to challenge the ugly narratives about Islam. Much of that sharing will take place on social media, used by many Somali youth. Hussein estimates that 50–60 percent of the Somali population in Minnesota is under the age of 40. They know English, have adapted to the culture, and are one of community’s best advantages in the fight against Islamophobia. The youth, Hussein says, are better able to communicate across the cultural divide—on the internet and off—without losing their own cultural identity.

Finally, CAIR-MN envisions an increase in traditional non-violent organizing tactics that raise public awareness, such as rallies and community education events. Mobilizing public events around Islamophobic incidents or targeted neighborhoods remains a crucial part in the fight against Islamophobia.

The most important element in these parts, Hussein stressed, is reaching beyond the existing participants of a conversation. Most people having conversations about Islamophobia in Minnesota are talking to people who agree with them, he points out. During Trump’s presidency, the only way to progress will be to hold conversations with people who disagree. “You can no longer say these people disagree with me or voted the other way, so I am not going to have a respectful conversation with them.”

Hussein would like to work with evangelical congregations, where pockets of Islamophobia can be found. Muslim outreach to evangelical Christians could “re-engineer how we communicate on this issue,” he says. “Without that outreach, we’re just talking to the same people we have already reached.”

Gaining resilience from experience.
Some Muslims use humor as a way to assuage the fear and uncertainty. Mohamud joked about an anti-Islamophobia sticker produced by a local organization that was translated incorrectly into Somali and Arabic, before moving to a sincere plea to recognize that “not all Republicans” are Islamophobes. He related the story of former Utah Sen. Bob Bennet’s dying remarks to Muslims, in which he apologized for his party’s embrace of Islamophobia.

Hussein opened his meeting at CAIR-MN with similar levity, joking about the election even as the fear created by Trump’s victory animated the room. There are reasons to be positive. From the election of the nation’s first Somali representative, Ilhan Omar of Minneapolis, who was sworn in last week, to the overwhelming interest in fighting Islamophobia that has emerged since Election Day, Somalis are hopeful.
The Somali community in Minnesota is a big target for bigotry, and tensions are expected to get worse. But in their experiences of facing both institutional and societal Islamophobia, their resilience and optimism is evident.

Christopher Zumski Finke wrote this article for YES! Magazine. He blogs about pop culture and is editor of The Stake. Follow him on Twitter at @christopherzf.

This article was first published in YES! Magazine.
 

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Iranian citizen and U.S green card holder Cyrus Khosravi (L) greets his brother, Hamidreza Khosravi (C), and niece, Dena Khosravi (R), 2, after they were detained for additional screening following their arrival to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport to visit Cyrus, during a pause in U.S. President Donald Trump's travel ban in SeaTac, Washington, U.S. February 6, 2017. (Photo: David Ryder)

In the latest legal blow to President Donald Trump's attempt to institute a controversial immigration and travel ban targeting seven predominantly Muslim nations, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday unanimously sided with a lower court which earlier this week imposed an injunction against Trump's executive order.

Reuters reports:
The ruling from the 9th Circuit, which followed a hearing on the case on Tuesday, does not resolve the lawsuit, but relates instead to whether Trump's order should be suspended while litigation proceeds.
Two members of the three-judge panel were appointed by former Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, and one was appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush.
The government could ask the entire 9th Circuit court to review the decision "en banc" or appeal directly to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The three judges said the states had shown that even temporary reinstatement of the ban would cause harm.

Read the full Ninth Circuit decision here (pdf).

Omar Jadwa, director of the Immigrants' Rights Project at the ACLU, which has also challenged the policy, welcomed the decision.

"The appeals court's refusal to reinstate the Muslim ban is correct," Jadwa said in a statement. "We will keep fighting this un-American executive order until it is permanently dismantled."

Meanwhile, Sahil Kapur, national political reporter for Bloomberg, points out some key takeaways from the ruling:

And whereas President Trump himself responded to the ruling by tweeting, "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!"" — it was ACLU attorneys who said they look forward to the opportunity:

Courtesy: CommonDreams

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Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

(Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Courtesy: MotherJones
 

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Protesters rally against President Donald Trump's refugee ban on Sunday, January 29, 2017 at Miami International Airport. Press Association/C.M. Guerrero/Miami Herald/TNS/ABACA. All rights reserved. 

Much of the United States and the rest of the world has reacted with shock and dismay at president Donald Trump’s recent travel ban – if not by the content of the executive order, which Trump had telegraphed during the campaign, then at least by the swiftness with which he put it in place, the uncertainty about how to comply with it, and the audacity of an executive-level directive that is so shamelessly xenophobic and anti-Islamic.The president’s executive order bars immigration from seven countries – Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia – for 90 days, suspends new refugee admissions for 120 days, and caps the total number of refugees allowed into the US this year at 50,000 – significantly lower than the 110,000 that the Obama administration had set as a goal for 2017. In response to the order, the Department of Homeland Security has detained people with valid visas at airports, in some cases sending them on return flights back to their home countries. After some confusion, the White House declared that green card holders would be allowed to enter the country, but that they would be considered on a “case-by-case basis” after passing a secondary screening.

Several challenges have been made in federal courts, and judges’ rulings have invariably qualified or suspended Trump’s order: blocking deportations, ordering that detained immigrants be allowed to consult with lawyers, or demanding the immediate release of valid visa-holders from federal detention. Acting US Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the Justice Department not to defend the executive order in court, claiming that it is inconsistent with the Department’s “solemn obligation to always seek justice and stand for what is right,” and that it may be illegal. Trump subsequently fired her.

US immigration policy has always served the country’s national, economic and political interests. Some of its first immigration laws sought to exclude people based solely on race or nationality. The Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, and the Quota Law of 1921 allotted specific numbers of immigrants based on country of origin, with the express purpose of prioritising those who would better assimilate into American culture. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, however, eliminated national origin as a basis for admission to the US.

The president has broad power to regulate immigration. According to U.S. Code §1182, if the president deems that allowing immigrants or refugees into the country would be “detrimental to the interests of the United States,” he can, without consent of Congress, “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.” The restrictions on refugees, then, are probably legal. Barring immigration from seven specific countries, however, is a point of contention. It seems to run afoul of the provision in the 1965 law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of national origin.

Trump cites 9/11 as an instance of the failure of US immigration policy, yet none of the nineteen hijackers came from the countries subject to the freeze.

The president’s stated reason for the travel ban is to protect the country from terrorist threats, but his reasoning is flawed in several different ways. First, it is based on incorrect assumptions – what the Trump administration would probably call “alternative facts.” The terrorist threat posed by legal (and indeed illegal) immigrants and refugees is minimal, nearly nonexistent. Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the Cato Institute, found that immigrants from the seven countries listed have killed zero people in terrorist attacks in the US between 1975 and 2015. Trump cites 9/11 as an instance of the failure of US immigration policy, yet none of the nineteen hijackers came from the countries subject to the freeze (fifteen came from Saudi Arabia). White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited both the Boston Marathon bombing and the San Bernardino shooting in defending Trump’s executive order, yet, again, none of these attackers would have been affected by this ban.

In a recent interview, Sebastian Gorka, deputy assistant to the president, said, “This executive order is a moral question because it’s about protecting Americans.” Meanwhile, there were over 15,000 gun-related deaths in the US in 2016, and Trump has vowed to protect the people’s individual right to bear arms. The appeal to public safety is a smokescreen that distracts people from real security issues that he won’t confront in favour of imagined security issues that he will.

There were over 15,000 gun-related deaths in the US in 2016, and Trump has vowed to protect the people’s individual right to bear arms. 

Trump’s calculation of the consequences not only overestimates the harm he is avoiding, but also underestimates the harm that this will cause for Syrian refugees. A refugee is by definition a displaced person who cannot return home safely – a claim that is verified by US officials before the person is granted refugee status. By denying Syrian refugees entry into the United States, the president is either putting them back into the horrible conditions of refugee camps, counting on the already overburdened countries of Europe and the Middle East to handle even more refugees, or returning them to the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Syria. Trump is showing little consideration for non-Americans, who are in far more danger and experience violence all around them, when there is no evidence that immigrants or refugees are a threat to Americans. Therefore, the travel ban is a flawed consequentialist argument, in that it appeals to a risk to US citizens that doesn’t exist as a reason to subject non-US citizens to a very real risk elsewhere.

Ultimately, the travel ban could harm Americans and permanent residents as well. The executive order has caused political turmoil throughout the United States. The effects that the ban will have on green card holders who are trying to reenter the country is still unclear, and this uncertainty will have an economic impact in the short and long term, since many green card holders are sponsored by employers. CEOs of several major American companies have come out against the ban, claiming that it will hamper their attempts to recruit foreign workers. It will also discourage tourism to the US and enrollment of foreign students in American universities, because travelers are unsure how president Trump’s decision (or his next decision) will affect them. The stock market has declined in response to the ban, signalling investors’ worries that it will have a negative impact on the American economy.

Perhaps most importantly, Trump’s travel ban gives credence to the narrative of ISIS and other terrorist groups that the west is at war with Islam, confirms the belief that the US discriminates against Muslims, and serves as a provocation to attack rather than an enhancement of security. Trump’s claim that “this is not a Muslim ban” is belied by the facts: his support of a Muslim ban during the campaign; his claim that he will prioritise Christian refugees; and a recent statement by Rudy Giuliani that Trump wanted to devise a Muslim ban that would be legal, and was told to do so by appealing to national security. The benefits of the ban are nonexistent, but the economic, political, and humanitarian costs are very real. Insofar as we ought to maximise the good in making our moral decisions, Trump’s travel ban is morally wrong.

The second problem with Trump’s reasoning is that he assumes the existing immigration policy, whatever it is, is too weak. During the campaign, he insisted that immigrants be subject to “extreme vetting,” but this was a ploy to appear stronger on national security than Obama and Clinton. Given the statistics cited above, it is clear that US immigration screening prior to the ban had successfully protected Americans from terrorist attacks. So, what has happened now is that Trump has made his vague campaign posturing – what is “extreme” vetting? – into the basis of an actual policy, and without any indication of what in the previous immigration policy needs to be corrected. The travel ban amounts to a kind of misdirection. In the case of Syrian refugees specifically, he is not just reviewing their cases more carefully, but restricting the number of refugees who are allowed entry – not vetting, but prohibiting the resettlement of tens of thousands of refugees whom the US could help.

Furthermore, Trump wrongly sees immigration as an isolated act by which a foreign person gains entry to the United States. In fact, the act of emigrating is only the final step in an extensive, months- or years-long vetting process, a process that is even more involved for citizens of countries that are designated as state sponsors of terrorism. Refugees specifically must be designated as such by the UN and interviewed by US Citizenship and Immigration Services officers abroad. They undergo a background check, an investigation of potential terrorist links, and verification of their refugee status – a process that takes about three years for Syrians because of heightened security concerns. By the time an immigrant or refugee makes it to the US, we have already engaged the person for years, collected their fees and forms, and have given them a visa. Morally, then, detaining them at the border could be considered a breach of promise, the violation of a duty to them that we have taken on by inviting them to apply for visas in good faith.

Trump is also violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which the US signed in 1967. The agreement obligates the government to protect those who would be endangered if they were returned to their home country. The temporary ban and the decrease in refugee flows into the US not only amount to a refusal to help those in need. They break a promise we have made to the world community.
Finally, the new refugee policy fails to satisfy US obligations to protect human rights. Like all people, Syrian refugees have a right to life and freedom from injustice. Other countries have a corresponding obligation to protect those rights insofar as it can be done alongside their other duties. The Obama administration did not do enough, but Trump’s restriction means that the US is failing even more in its commitment to reduce suffering and protect human rights. The result is that Syrians will continue to be subjected to indiscriminate violence, or that countries in Europe and the Middle East will have to accept even more refugees. The US is thus placing a greater burden on countries that are already bearing a disproportionate amount of the costs: there are 2.7 million Syrian refugees in Turkey, 1 million in Lebanon, 600,000 in Germany, and only 16,000 in the United States. By not doing its fair share, the US is endangering Syrians and failing to alleviate the social and economic pressure on countries, including its allies, which are in some cases being politically destabilised.

Executive orders are not divine pronouncements. We must resist them if they are immoral and illegal.

The president’s travel ban is probably illegal, but it is clearly immoral. It disregards the suffering of non-US citizens while giving absolute priority to a false sense of security for Americans. It increases rather than decreases security concerns for US citizens, and hinders the American economy. By discriminating against Muslims, it contradicts the US’s longstanding and constitutionally guaranteed commitment to religious pluralism. It reneges on promises made to people who have submitted themselves to the country’s thorough and successful immigration processes, and it fails to honor international agreements.

Massive protests in the US are demonstrating to Trump and the rest of the world that the American people, by and large, do not see refugees and immigrant visa-holders as a security threat, and that they reject the anti-Muslim sentiment codified in the order. Organisations such as the ACLU should continue to challenge the travel ban in court. Early rulings by federal judges have been encouraging. And American lawmakers should use the power they have to oppose Trump on this issue – for example, by voting against Trump’s nominee for Attorney General unless he explicitly rejects the ban and vows, like Yates, not to defend it in court. Executive orders are not divine pronouncements. We must resist them if they are immoral and illegal.

Matthew C. Altman is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy & Religious Studies Department at Central Washington University.

Courtesy: Open Democracy

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वीजा न देने की वजह जानने पर अमेरिकी दूतावास ने एथलीट से कहा कि 'वर्तमान नीति' के तहत उसके किसी भी सवाल का जवाब भी नहीं दिया जाएगा। कश्‍मीर के इस एथलीट का नाम तनवीर हुसैन है और वह 'स्‍लो शू-रनिंग' चैंपियन हैं। 25 फरवरी को न्‍यूयॉर्क में होने वाली वर्ल्‍ड चैंपियनशिप में तनवीर भारत का प्रतिनिधित्‍व करने वाले थे। लेकिन दूतावास से वीजा ने मिलने की वजह से अब तनवीर के चैंपियनशिप में भाग लेने पर सवालिया निशान लग गया है।
 
तनवीर ने मामले की जानकारी देते हुए बताया कि, 'शू-रनिंग की वर्ल्‍ड फे‍डरेशन की ओर भारतीय फेडरेशन को चिट्ठी भेजी गई थी। इसके बाद भारतीय फे‍डरेशन ने उनका चयन चैंपियनशिप के लिए किया था।' पिछले वर्ष इटली में हुई वर्ल्‍ड चैंपियनशिप में तनवीर ने भारत को प्रतिनिधित्‍व किया था। इटली में उनके प्रदर्शन से प्रभावित होकर इस साल भी अमेरिका में होने वाली चैंपियनशिप के लिए उसका चयन किया गया था।
 
तनवीर ने कहा कि, उसके सारे डॉक्‍यूमेंट्स पूरे थे और साथ ही वर्ल्‍ड फेडरेशन की भेजी गई चिट्ठी भी थी। इसके अलावा जहां पर चैंपियनशिप होनी है उस शहर के मेयर की चिट्ठी भी दूतावास को ई-मेल कर दी गई है। जब मंगलवार को तनवीर वीजा के इंटरव्‍यू के लिए अमेरिकी दूतावास गए थे और तब पहले उसके डॉक्‍यूमेंट्स को स्‍क्रीन किया गया। फिर उससे खेल से जुड़ी उपलब्धियों को दिखाने के लिए कहा गया। इस पर तनवीर ने उन्‍हें कुछ न्‍यूजपेपर्स की कटिंग दिखाई। लेकिन बाद में दूतावास के अधिकारियों ने उसे बताया कि वर्तमान नीतियों के चलते तनवीर को वीजा नहीं दिया जा सकता है। इसके अलावा दूतावास ने किसी भी सवाल का जवाब देने से इंकार कर दिया।

Courtesy: National Dastak
 

The post ट्रंप भक्तों को बड़ा झटका, भारतीय एथलीट को नहीं दिया वीजा appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Register how you feel about each of them.

Story one: “Why are you not Christian?” a man asks you.

Story two: You wake up to find someone has left a Bible on your doorstep.

Which of these sounds more violent, more threatening to you? Or neither?

Now, imagine yourself a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in a Western country and repeat the two stories to yourself again. How would you feel?

Now let me complete each story and give you some context.
 

Story one

“Why are you not Christian?” the man asked, kindly, in broken English.

“We believe in Jesus and the Bible,” I said, wanting to comfort him, “and we have a lot of Christians in Egypt where I come from.”

This happened to me in Houston, Texas around 2007 or 2008. The man was a plumber coming in to fix my sink. He found it difficult to express himself in English but seemed to care about saving my soul, however misguided that was.

It didn’t occur to me to be offended or afraid. This was a time when America was on the cusp of electing either a black president, a female president or at least a female vice president. Houston, despite what all my American friends had told me before I left Egypt, was not a generally racist place to live.

Half of the surgery fellows working with my husband at the Texas Heart Institute were Muslim. Some strangers said “Assalamu Alaikum” (peace be upon you) to me on the streets, or stopped me and my friends to
comment on the beauty of our colourful headscarves.
 

Story two

You wake up to find someone has left a Bible on your doorstep. This happened to a friend in North America, soon after Donald Trump was elected president. She felt it was a threat or a subtle act of violence. She wondered how her neighbours would feel if she placed a Qur’an on their doorsteps.

When I heard my friend’s story, it got me thinking about the possible intentions of the person who placed that Bible on her doorstep.

I trust that my friend’s feeling of being threatened was real in that context. But I wondered if the story might have been different. What if the story had included a note inside the Bible, showing who had left it, or giving an invitation to exchange holy books?

What if the Bible on the doorstep had been the beginning of a dialogue rather than a way to scare someone away? And if the person who left the Bible on my friend’s doorstep didn’t have bad intentions, why didn’t they do it in person and look her in the eye?
 

Context and power

There are differences between story one and two, chief among them are context and power. The political context and who the actors are make a difference to the story. An elderly, Hispanic plumber fixing my sink? Not a threat to my 20-something self in Houston, accompanying my surgeon husband doing a fellowship at a prestigious nearby hospital.

Had I been asked the same question by a white man, in an angry voice, in another context, my reaction would probably have been very different.

I am telling this story in the era where we are lamenting the rise of fake news and exploring our roles as educators to respond to it, as if a technical solution to figuring out if something is a lie will fix our problems. It won’t. Because it’s not a technical problem.

Education and understanding

Donald Trump’s executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US is not fake news. It’s real news. And as a community, we have to deal with it.

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has said:

Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ‘secondly’. Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.

The media does this all the time. So do politicians – we see Donald Trump right now, talking about banning Iraqi refugees and immigrants from entering the US, without mentioning the role of his country in causing the instability that motivated the immigration in the first place.

Adichie also says:

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

In my view, the best way to ensure that we and our children see more than the stereotypical story about people who are different from us is to expose them and ourselves to multiple stories. The bare minimum is to expose ourselves to other cultures on their own terms.

So, for example, we don’t learn about Native Americans from Pocahontas or from Western films. We learn from Native Americans themselves. If we don’t have direct access to them (I live a long way away in Egypt), find them online. Read or listen or even, if you’re lucky, converse.

I know what you’re thinking. I’m Muslim, talking about Muslims in America. What brought this on? But in the midst of my concern over Muslims in America, I also noticed Trump’s presidential memo to advance approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline, I can see the injustice in this, and the irony: on the one hand, a “nation of immigrants” that is neither honouring immigrants, nor honouring the original residents of this land.

We will always have blind spots towards cultures that are unfamiliar to us. But the more deeply we establish understanding of the “other”, the more we try to empathise, with social justice as our underlying value, the more likely we are to become empathetic, critical, global citizens. As educators, we must expand and diversify the people in our in-groups, and help students do this too.

Education expert Sean Michael Morris, on the day of Trump’s inauguration, urged us to change the way we teach. He wrote:

An education that convinces us of what needs to be known, what is important versus what is frivolous, is not an education. It’s training at best, conscription at worst. And all it prepares us to do is to believe what we’re told.

This goes for parents and mentors as well as those of us in more formal teaching roles.
 

Building empathy

The best way not to believe what we’re told is not to go fact-checking each and every thing we hear. Instead, I propose we start building our ability to understand people who are different from us, in context, rather than relying on harmful stereotypes. To know them as individuals, as they would like to be known, not as some dominant power (or US president) has decided we shall know them.

This is not quick or simple. But it can allow us to form a view of the world that rises above deception and to see what’s important in our humanity. And it will change the way we vote. When we empathise with others, we imagine how our decisions can impact them.

Remember those two stories I mentioned earlier? Back in 2007 and 2008, I felt comfortable and safe praying in a mosque in Houston. Now, I would not, given the latest news of Islamophobic violence in mosques coming from North America, most recently the terrorist attack on a mosque in Quebec City that left six people dead.

My friend with the Bible on her doorstep, a dual citizen, was unable to attend a conference in the US a few days ago.

But that isn’t the biggest tragedy. The tragic stories are those of families torn apart by this executive order. Parents who cannot reach their children. What we need now, more than ever, is empathy.

Maha Bali, Associate Professor of Practice, Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo
 

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post There is more than one story to be told about Muslims in Trump’s America appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Image credit:  Steve Dipaola/ Reuters

In the months before Donald Trump’s despicable executive order peremptorily banning entrants to the United States from select Muslim-majority countries and placing a temporary stop on all refugee admissions was promulgated, many commentators attempted to find the words to capture the smallness of mind and moral vision of the new president. Roger Cohen is among those who have done so recently, in a powerful piece in the New York Times published just before Trump’s latest execrable order, in which he noted that “a rough translation of ‘America First’ is Muslims last”.

That this pitiable notion of “America First”, although part of a tradition, is not in keeping with other American traditions, such as that of the Quakers, is hardly the point. Although it wraps itself in pragmatic claims of protection against terrorism, the order in fact represents the rejection of the idea of liberal democracy itself, understood as grounded in conceptions of equal treatment of persons (even if this idea was to be applied differently to citizen insiders and non-citizen outsiders).
 

Democracy’s foundations

Considerations of human dignity arising from what the philosopher John Rawls understood as a “broadly Kantian” background to the shared public culture of liberal democracy played a crucial role in upholding their institutions, and underpinning such ideas as “public reason”, bringing together the idea that justification in a democracy must require reasons and that these must be of a kind that could be accepted by others, having different “comprehensive conceptions of the good”, such as followers of different religions or none at all.

Another American philosopher, Richard Rorty, referred to a “human rights culture” underpinning liberal democracies, and crystalised in facts such as the abhorrence of torture, in retrospect a precisely and presciently chosen example. However he worried, and controversially argued, that this had no ultimate philosophical or political support except itself.

Whatever one’s view on the matter of foundations, that such a culture plays a vital role in the practical sustenance of respect for human rights and dignity seems unexceptionable.

By claiming a cloak of democratic legitimacy but rejecting the substantive requirements of a human rights culture, Trump’s vision of America, to the extent democratic at all, harks back to a classical conception, present in Athens and Rome, in which dignity and rights were narrowly restricted, and even then dispensable. The use of slaves on a mass scale by these ancient western democracies is well known.
 

Illiberal majoritarianism

Today’s equivalent is the thesis that majoritarian democracy justifies riding roughshod over the substantive rights of minorities within and of ideals of equal consideration without. The “universalisable” moral ideas that are employed are selective ones, such as that of a right to the protection or promotion of majority cultural interests, a sovereign prerogative to take actions to protect against terrorism and so on. Participants in the struggle for civil rights in the United States knew that the obstacle to their cause was not an absence of purported “moral” arguments but the power of perversely applied ones, such as the appeal to states’ rights as justification for the domestic apartheid regime.

The common political tactic of the new and enthusiastic confederation of illiberal majoritarian regimes is that perverse and selective deployments of concern are combined with a “fake news” appeal to an imminent threat to the supposed majority to justify a hierarchical rather than a democratic order: the antithesis of the political ideal of liberal democracy. The hierarchy may operate implicitly – through certain “signs” being elevated to dominance, offering signals as to who should gain precedence and how ambiguities should be adjudicated in society – or explicitly, in law.

The institutional significance of Trump’s executive order is that it represents a transition from the first to the second. Practically, it represents the a move to end the application of ideas which gained domestic force in the United States during the civil rights era, and global force during the era of decolonisation, to immigrants and refugees to the US, as embodied in the 1965 Immigration and Naturalisation Act, which made possible larger subsequent movements of people from areas of the world hitherto restricted.

However, this is but a step in a broader effort to bring about a conceptual revolution, cheered by illiberal majoritarians everywhere. They understand that its real importance is to strike at the idea of the human rights culture – not because the US had been looked to as its champion, much as some may wish sentimentally to believe that, but because this is a signal that there is a new order of things. Among the supposed votaries of liberal democracy, the difference between those calculators and supplicants who offer tepid or no criticism and those who do otherwise must be judged in this context. As Rorty and others have insisted, argumentative reasoning, even if “correct”, has little effect in the face of barbarism. The sum of our words and our deeds matters more.

Sanjay G Reddy is an Associate Professor of Economics at The New School for Social Research.

Courtesy: Scroll.in

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