By Douglas Murray
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
I wonder whether there might be any long-term effects
from shouting ‘racist’, ‘fascist’, ‘misogynist’ all the time? It is possible
that it is hard to think while your fingers are in your ears and you are
shouting names at everybody. I just put the thought out there.
Certainly the consequences of not thinking much seem to
be all around us. Though the Trump
administration has decided to put temporary travel restrictions on people from
certain countries, the policy seems to have certain internal inconsistencies.
For instance, as Gordon Brown said in 2008, 75 per cent of Britain’s security
threats originate from Pakistan. As anybody involved in the American security
apparatus in recent years could tell you, one of the biggest – and for a period
the biggest – security threats to America has been from Pakistani nationals or
people of Pakistani heritage with UK passports heading to America via the UK.
So if the Trump administration wants to impose blanket bans on any particular
group of people, UK citizens of Pakistani heritage would be a better place to
start. Another example of the
inconsistency is that the country which most of the 9/11 hijackers came from –
Saudi Arabia – is not on the list of countries whose nationals now face a
temporary hiatus in their ability to travel to the US.
So there appears to be a certain lack of thought on some
of the details of this policy. But it is nothing compared to the lack of
thought among the policy’s critics. Indeed the opposition to the ban – from Lily
Allen down – is striking for the fact that it has clearly thought about none of
the central questions which should have preoccupied us all in recent years.
Thus the people who are portraying the ban as something which is illegal,
fascist etc are – if I may say so – making a huge long-term mistake. If you
decide that border restrictions are fascist then you are declaring the views of
most people to be fascist, because most people believe in border security. If
you believe that restricting people coming in to your country or any other
country is bigoted then you are claiming that most of the world is filled with
bigots. If you believe absolutely everybody from everywhere should be treated
in exactly the same manner (i.e. that immigration controls should everywhere
and always be origin-blind) then you are arguing against the security protocols
of every border security agency on earth.
In my own view it would help immensely if the people who
are lambasting the Trump administration had at least given some thought to the
following questions and could go some way to giving answers to such questions
as:
1 – Do you accept that America (like many other countries
in the world today) has security problems? Do you recognise that despite the
giggly charts on social media showing lawnmowers to be more of a threat to
American life than terrorism, there are legitimate security concerns that
reasonable Americans might hold?
2 – Do you recognise that Islamic terrorism is not a
figment of a fevered imagination, but a real thing that exists and which causes
a risk to human life in America and many other countries? This isn’t to say
that other forms of terrorism don’t exist – they obviously do. But how might
you address this one (assuming you can’t immediately solve global peace,
poverty, unhappiness, lack of satisfactory sex, masculinity etc)?
3 – If you do recognise the above fact then would you
concede that large scale immigration from Islamic countries into the US might
bring a larger number of potential challenges than, say, large scale
immigration from New Zealand or Iceland?
4 – Is everybody who wants to visit Disney World morally
akin to Jews fleeing the Holocaust? If not then what are the differences, and
is it always wise to conflate the two?
5 – Would you recognise that Iran is one of the world’s
leading state-sponsors of terror, and that, for example, an Iranian-born
American citizen in 2011 was caught planning to carry out a terror attack in
Washington (against the Saudi Ambassador)? Would you recognise that aggravating
though a temporary halt on all Iranian nationals visiting the US might be, and
many good people though it will undoubtedly stop, there is a reason that some
countries cause a greater security concern than others? Might citizens of a
country whose leadership regularly chants ‘Death to America’ present a larger
number of questions for border security than, say, citizens of Denmark whose
government rarely says the same? What would your vetting policy be to
distinguish between different Iranians seeking to enter the US?
6 – Does the whole world have the right to live in America?
This is a variant of the same question we Europeans should have been asking for
years. If you do not think that the whole world has the right to live in the
USA then who should be allowed to live there and who should not? Who might be
given priority?
7 – If you believe in giving some people asylum, as I do,
who should be given priority? Should asylum be forever? Or should there be a
time-limit (such as up until such a time as your country of origin is deemed
safe)? How do you deal with people who have been given asylum, whose reason for
asylum is over (i.e. their country has returned to peace) but whose children
have entered the school system (for instance)?
8 – Is it wrong that the Trump administration says it
wishes to favour Christian refugees over Muslim refugees? This is a fascinating
and difficult moral question. Many Christians refuse to accept that the plight
of Christians – even when they are the specific target of persecution – should
be given priority over anyone else. This is a noble example of Christian
universalism, but is it wise or moral when you consider the limited numbers
that can come in and if you accept that the entire persecuted world cannot
arrive in America?
9 – How do you identify the type of Muslims who America
should indeed welcome? And how do you distinguish them from the sort of Muslims
who the country could well do without? In other words, what would your vetting
procedures be? There are some people who
have thought about this. But what is your policy?
If you think all of the above questions are simply
‘racist’ or ‘bigoted’ then I suppose the rest of us will just have to accept
that we’re going to lose you to four years of shouting on the streets in vagina
hats. But the rest of us should try to address these questions. We’re not going
to be able to shout them away you know.
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