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These Elegant Short Stories Are the Perfect Rebuke to Nationalism

by hector1479 Posted on March 25, 2017

Mother Jones

In an era when insular politics have taken hold across the US and parts of Europe, Kanishk Tharoor’s debut short story collection Swimmer Among the Stars: Stories (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is refreshing for its lack of attachment to national borders. Blending together the futuristic and folkloric with contemporary social and political concerns, Tharoor leads readers from a circus-like ethnography of a single woman speaking an endangered language to an eerie Skype call between a coal mine worker and the foreign photojournalist who splashes his image on a magazine.

Much of the collection’s charm probably owes to Tharoor’s own peripatetic adolescence, spent shuttling between Geneva, New York, and Calcutta as the son of Indian statesman Shashi Tharoor. “Even though I’m Indian and I grew up in America, the lineages which my fiction aspires to aren’t just Indian or American,” Tharoor says. “I can find as much pleasure and value reading a Finnish epic.” The result is a style of writing that lifts its references liberally across time and space rather than wrestling with the split of a hyphenated identity: “I was able to grow up in New York City with a sense of myself as an Indian who happened to be living in New York.”

Tharoor is perhaps best known as the presenter of last year’s BBC radio series on the Museum of Lost Objects, which looked at the plunder and destruction of antiquities during the wars in Syria and Iraq. “The past has always felt contemporary and relevant to me,” Tharoor says. His own upbringing sparked a “wider interest in recovering the kinds of connections and moments in history” that are buried. I talked to Tharoor about his upbringing and fiction’s role in the age of nationalist fervor.

Mother Jones: Given the surge of nationalism sweeping through the US and parts of Europe recently, what role do you see for authors in societies seemingly retreating from globalization?

Kanishk Tharoor: I do think it is incumbent upon writers to open their fiction to a wider frame of reference. Americans have always had this luxury of being a “continent of a nation.” A lot of people elsewhere in the world have to be a lot more open to the literature of other places because they’re smaller. America is so big—in every sense—so Americans have always been able to satisfy their cultural needs within the bounds of their own nation. I think what we consider American literature can often be a little bit insular. It would be great if people read more translation, or if American writers took a wider interest in the world beyond the immediate world of their own country’s fiction. At a minimum, we should all be reading more literature from other places: That’s one of the best ways that the walls around us can be knocked down.

MJ: What unites the stories in Swimmer Among the Stars, in your view? Why did you feel they belonged together?

KT: I’m always interested in recovering lost moments that often get suppressed in the larger, dominant narrative. A lot of these stories are about recovering lost objects. Even if one story is set in an apocryphal village in central Asia, and another is set in outer space, there is a thematic interest that links them.

MJ: The “Fall of an Eyelash” looks at refugees. Was the genesis of that story directly linked to the news cycle?

KT: Part of it is actually based on a family friend’s story who fled Iran. When I wrote this story, it was before waves of Syrian refugees entered Europe, and seeing that crisis metastasizing. We live in the greatest era of displacement because of conflict and this short story is certainly interested in the experience of that problem.

MJ: What about the story “Portrait with Coal Fire”?

KT: I was looking at this photo of an Indian miner in deplorable conditions doing horrific work. There’s a great deal of sympathy on the part of the photographer and indeed the readers of the magazine itself. At the same time, it made me think about: Has the man seen this photograph, and what does he think about seeing himself in a magazine like this, if that was even possible? It was almost a thought experiment—to imagine what would it be like to be photographed and try to be represented in a way that you thought was more appropriate.

MJ: With your father Shashi Tharoor publishing more than a dozen books, mostly on the history and politics of India, how much of your own literary journey started at home?

My dad is a writer, but my mom is a professor of English literature as well, so I grew up in a household flooded with books. I’m also a broadcast journalist, which I do alongside my fiction work. Readers of the collection will see there is pretty strong historical interest present. For a while, I considered becoming a historian, but I decided the kind of writing I wanted to do was not academic writing.

MJ: One of your characters is the last speaker of an unnamed language. Are you interested the preservation of rare languages? How many languages do you speak?

KT: I speak maybe six or seven languages imperfectly. I don’t really consider myself much of a polyglot.

The issue of language extinction has always interested me. We live in crazy times in human history in terms of the death of languages. A friend of mine runs the Endangered Language Alliance, Ross Perlin, and he studies languages and endangered languages. He turned me on to the fact that in New York City, where I live, over 800 languages are spoken in the city. There are many languages here, whether they’re from East Africa or southeast Asia or wherever else, which are no longer spoken in the places where they came from, but survive here in dying form amongst immigrant communities. As people who read, write, think, and dream in English, it is incumbent upon us to be aware of the damages or the losses incurred by these languages.

MJ: One of your short stories hints at the danger of climate change. How do you see an author’s duty, if there is one, to engage with political or environmental struggles?

KT: Fiction, I think, can make people think about issues, can spark imaginations, can open doors, can take people out of their own frame of reference. All those things are good. That’s what I would like to do with my fiction. I don’t know how much I would like to serve an advocacy function. If there is a story that touches on climate change, I think the message is embedded in the conceit of the story.

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These Elegant Short Stories Are the Perfect Rebuke to Nationalism

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Here’s What It’s Like to Be Muslim in the Bible Belt in 2017

by Reyna8421h Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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In August 2012, a mosque opened in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a bustling college town outside of Nashville that is home to students, long-time residents, refugees, suburban families, and everyone in between. The national headlines for the stories about the event suggested some of the conflicts that had led to this moment: The New York Daily News wrote, “Tennessee Mosque Opens After Years of Controversy,” the New York Times wrote “After a Struggle, Mosque Opens in Tennessee”, and NPR wrote “Murfreesboro Mosque Finally Opens.”

But the summer day when it opened was peaceful and harmonious, with the exception of a lone protester, wearing an “I Love Jesus” hat and a shirt bearing the 10 Commandments. The day was one for celebration, and the members of the Muslim community who had gathered were not dwelling on the fact that during court battles over permits, Rutherford County had spent more than $340,000 in legal fees fighting the right to build this place of worship. Or that the lieutenant governor of Tennessee at the time, Ron Ramsey, had described Islam as a “cult” while voicing opposition to the mosque.

The community itself was split between those attacking the approximately 300 families of the mosque for being Muslim and those who banded with their Muslim neighbors. The peaceful community was the target of a bomb threat—the anonymous caller, later found to be a Texas man, promised it would go off inside the office space where the community was worshipping in the interim on Sept. 11. A vandal scrawled “not welcome” across a sign announcing the construction of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. Construction equipment used to build the walls of the mosque was set on fire, its charred remains a warning to worshippers that they were not safe. But after two troubled years, the mosque finally opened, and residents began to take its presence on Veals Road for granted.

Then Donald Trump was elected, and the anti-Muslim rhetoric that once inflamed the Bible Belt town of 126,000 was reignited.

Murfreesboro is home to a very small fraction of American Muslims, but it was primed for a backlash in a unique way. Most residents remember the saga of the mosque, and the Baptist church next door made its anti-Islam position very clear by erecting 13 10-foot-tall crosses into the ground “to make a statement.” There are residents of Murfreesboro who stood with their Muslim neighbors, leaving flowers and handwritten cards at the front door of the mosque, but there are increasingly louder voices that threaten the safety of others who happen to be Muslim. It’s a sort of microcosm of what has happened across the country, where tensions and even violence have escalated against Muslims in the wake of the inflammatory rhetoric of President Donald Trump.

“People are afraid, and they won’t tell others about harassment,” says Saleh Sbenaty, a leader in the Muslim community, who was deeply involved in the struggle to get the mosque built. “It’s really scary and dangerous.”

He added that some members of the mosque have told him they are considering not attending services because they are frightened of the possibility of an attack. When news broke that a mosque in Texas had been set on fire shortly after Trump announced an executive order temporarily banning refugees from seven predominantly Muslim countries, they prayed for safety. When a shooting at a Quebec City mosque by a 27-year-old white male who was reportedly “a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump” left six dead and more injured three days after Trump’s executive order, they felt their worst fears were being confirmed.

The Sbenaty family left Syria because it was unsafe, and they wanted a better life for themselves and their children. His daughter Dima was born in Damascus, but her mother brought her to the United States when she was eight months old to join Saleh, who was earning his PhD at the time. Their son, Salim, was born in Murfreesboro. A week after the election, 20-year-old Salim, was waiting tables at a local restaurant when he was asked, “Son, where are you from?”

“I was born and raised here in Murfreesboro,” he replied.

The response was abrupt. “You look foreign.”

“My parents came from Damascus a long time ago,” Salim said. The man stared.

“I’m going to the car to get my gun.”

Later that night, he told his father, who was horrified, and asked how he responded. Salim said the man had probably never met anyone who looked like him before, and he did not want to deepen his hatred. Saleh says many people in the Muslim community in Murfreesboro would have done the same, although he encouraged his son to report the incident.

During his campaign, Trump went back and forth on a proposal to create a “Muslim registry.” When he was asked about it in November 2015, he said, “We’re going to have to look at a lot of things very closely. We’re going to have to look at the mosques.” Later, he said he wanted to have a database on Syrian refugees who immigrate into the United States. Less than a month later, in December 2015, he proposed banning all Muslim immigration. Trump has consistently talked about the threat of “radical Islam,” and in an interview with CNN last year, he told Anderson Cooper, “I think Islam hates us.”

Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, has also been vocal about his views on Islam. “We are in an outright war against jihadist, Islamic fascists,” Bannon said in a 2014 speech. He also said the religion was metastasizing—like cancer.

Some Tennessee lawmakers have spouted similar claims—Tennessee state Sen. Mae Beavers told town hall attendees on Feb. 16 that Muslim terrorists were “infiltrating churches” and planning jihad in the Bible Belt. She also has expressed support for Trump’s “Muslim ban.” Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who served as a vice chair of Trump’s transition team, said Trump’s immigration order was a “security test, not a religious one.”

“Our intelligence and security agencies must ascertain the scope of the Islamic terror threat in order to develop proper refugee vetting protocols—if possible,” she wrote in an op-ed for The Tennessean.

And now, according to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, anti-Muslim hate groups have tripled since 2015.

Ossama Bahoul, the former imam at the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, said there is a big difference between what the Muslim community in Middle Tennessee went through when the mosque was being built and what is happening now. Back then, the government was on their side—it defended his people’s right to worship and promised to take swift action against anyone who threatened them. Now, he hears the Islamophobia that used to come from the mouths of protesters coming from the government. “It is really disturbing for me to be talking about this,” Bahloul said. “The people who are supposed to protect us are singling our community out. That’s tough.”

Bahloul and Saleh Sbenaty tell Mother Jones about women who had been threatened for wearing the hijab and sometimes, Bahloul said, people have tried to assault them. Schoolchildren have come home crying because other children asked if their headscarves are hiding a bomb. Other Muslims have told him they have heard mutterings of “it’s about time to clean up America” and “go back home” when they pass by.

Recently, when another student at school referred to one of the children in his congregation as “Bin Laden,” Bahloul found himself at a loss. “Our kids were born in America—they don’t speak any language but English,” he said. “They are American kids, and they will come at a very young age and say, ‘Why do they hate us?'”

The effects of Trump’s comments about Muslims is not restricted to the random acts of violence directed at Muslims in the United States. The executive order he signed banning refugees and immigrants from seven predominantly-Muslim countries—including Syria—mean the Sbenatys and other families fear they’ll be separated from family members for quite some time. Saleh hasn’t seen his mother, who is 83, in 11 years. He wants to bring her to America, but the recent events make that seem unlikely. His siblings got married after he left Syria, and he has nieces and nephews he has never met. Minutes after the Ninth Circuit Court filed a preliminary injunction against Trump’s immigration order, effectively putting it on hold, Trump tweeted, in all caps: “See you in court, the security of our nation is at stake!”

“Now there is no option for me to go and visit or for them to come over here,” Saleh told Mother Jones before the court ruling. “It’s something you cannot explain in words.”

Dima Sbenaty, Saleh’s daughter, is a 27-year-old clinical coordinator for the stroke unit at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. The week after Trump’s “Muslim ban” took effect, she spoke at a vigil in support of Muslim Americans. Thousands showed up. “Islam taught me to give back…As a Muslim, it is my obligation to you to be strong, to uphold justice, and to protect your rights,” she told the crowd that night. “That is how America raised me.”

Recently, she decided to start wearing a hijab, and because of the outward signifier that she is Muslim, she has encountered some animosity in the workplace. Sometimes, when she’s out running errands, she gets an uncomfortable sensation, like she’s being watched by someone with less-than-friendly intentions. But she’s determined not to let fear rule her. “I’m practicing my freedom by covering my hair; I’m practicing my freedom by saying that I’m Muslim and going to the mosque,” she tells Mother Jones. “That’s my freedom as an American, and I don’t think I should be afraid…Refugees are leaving a place where they’re being dehumanized. They’re coming into America to seek refuge, and they’re entering another hell.”

As for Imam Bahloul, he is still wrestling with how to explain to the community what is happening and how to deal with being targeted. “For a girl to cry and say, ‘I want to cover my hair, but I’m scared,’ that girl must not be scared in America,” he said. “We’re part of the American fabric.”

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Here’s What It’s Like to Be Muslim in the Bible Belt in 2017

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Here’s How the Green Card Chaos Unfolded

by graigwerner4817 Posted on February 4, 2017

Mother Jones

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Josh Rogin has a fascinating piece in the Washington Post today about the turmoil within the Trump administration over the immigration order issued last week. Much of this was due to the fact that no one outside the White House, including those who had to carry out the order, were part of the review process. The end result, apparently, was a temporary halt to executive orders “until a process was established that included the input of key officials outside the White House.”

But it’s worth putting this all in a timeline. Here it is, drawing from Rogin’s article and a CNN summary.

Friday afternoon: Trump signs immigration order

Saturday evening: As chaos ensues, “The man charged with implementing the order, Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly, had a plan. He would issue a waiver for green-card holders from the seven majority-Muslim countries whose citizens had been banned from entering the United States.”

Later Saturday evening: “White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon wanted to stop Kelly in his tracks. Bannon paid a personal and unscheduled visit to Kelly’s Department of Homeland Security office to deliver an order: Don’t issue the waiver. Kelly, according to two administration officials familiar with the confrontation, refused to comply with Bannon’s instruction…. Respectfully but firmly, the retired general and longtime Marine told Bannon that despite his high position in the White House and close relationship with Trump, the former Breitbart chief was not in Kelly’s chain of command.”

Later still on Saturday evening: “Trump didn’t call Kelly to tell him to hold off. Kelly issued the waiver late Saturday night.” But the waiver is not announced, and green card holders continue to be denied entry.

2 am Sunday morning: “A conference call of several top officials was convened to discuss the ongoing confusion over the executive order….On the call were Bannon, White House senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, White House Counsel Donald McGahn, national security adviser Michael Flynn, Kelly, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Secretary of State designee Rex Tillerson, who had not yet been confirmed.”

8 am Sunday morning: “In mere minutes during an interview with NBC, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said the order ‘doesn’t affect’ green card holders, then later said ‘of course’ it affects green card holders from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Yemen and Somalia — the seven countries Trump has temporarily stop immigration from for 90 days.”

6 pm Sunday evening: “Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly issued a statement clarifying their status saying ‘lawful permanent resident status will be a dispositive factor in our case-by-case determinations.’ Another Homeland Security official told CNN…’This is our message to them: get on a plane. Come back to the US. You will be subject to secondary screening, but everything else will be normal.’ “

Kelly is implicitly the hero of this story. And yet, he allowed the green card confusion to continue all day Sunday even though he had issued his waiver Saturday night. Some hero.

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Here’s How the Green Card Chaos Unfolded

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Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

by TommieGrout Posted on January 30, 2017

Mother Jones

On Saturday morning, Niki Mossafer Rahmati got off her flight from Tehran in Doha, Qatar to board a connecting flight to Boston, when she got caught up in the chaos set off by President Trump’s immigration order.

Rahmati, an MIT junior studying mechanical engineering, had been home with her family for winter break when she received word Wednesday morning of the pending executive order. She changed her flight to return to Boston right away, only to find that order had gone into effect in the middle of her connecting flight to Doha. She and some 30 other Iranians with legal visas were blocked from boarding the plane and sent back to Tehran. Among them, Rahmati says, were two women traveling to their pregnant daughters to help them through their last trimester.

“Do any of the people sound like illegal immigrants?” Rahmati asked in a public Facebook post after arriving back home in Tehran. “This will not secure the borders from terrorism and illegal immigrants. It will only increase racism in the American society. The president is trying to make Islamophobia a norm and policy by which he wants to lead the country.”

“My inbox is flooded with messages and emails of love and support,” she also wrote. “But I cannot believe all this love is coming from the same country that banned me from entering its borders just a couple of hours ago.”

Rahmati is just one among many students from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who have been barred from returning to school. MIT alone has 38 students from Iran, 1 from Iraq, 5 from Syria, 2 from Sudan, and 1 from Somalia; two, including Rahmati, were reportedly unable to board flights back to Boston. According to the New York Times, students from Stanford, Harvard, and Yale, among other universities, have also been affected.

Yesterday, after thousands of protesters stormed US airports to fight for the release of people detained upon arrival, a federal judge in Brooklyn blocked part of President Trump’s order by temporarily allowing valid visa holders who had landed in the US to stay. Federal judges in Massachusetts, Virginia, and Washington quickly followed suit, with the Massachusetts order additionally restraining enforcement of the order for visa holders traveling back to the US in the next seven days.

In response, MIT issued an statement urging students and staff to “fly back to Boston—directly to Logan Airport—as soon as possible, and before February 4.” Whether or not the court order will be respected by Custom and Border Protection officials abroad is unknown.

Rahmati is a member of the sorority Sigma Kappa and counselor for the MIT chapter of Camp Kesem, a national nonprofit that operates free summer camps for children whose parents have had cancer. For weeks before heading home for break, Rahmati had been fundraising for this summer’s camp. After the election, Rahmati encouraged her friends to keep an open mind to Trump supporters, according to her roommate.

As news of her situation has spread, the MIT community sprang into action, calling elected officials and circulating a White House petition. At this writing, her ability to return to MIT to finish her undergraduate remains uncertain.

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Students With Valid Visas Are Trapped in Limbo Abroad

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"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

by ZoilaSandes65 Posted on January 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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Despite a decade of working to help America in Iraq, Hameed Khalid Darweesh was welcomed to the United States with handcuffs. Darweesh had received a special immigrant visa on January 20 for his work as a contractor, engineer, and interpreter for the Army’s 101st Airborne Division in Baghdad and Mosul. But when he arrived at New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport on Friday night, he was among the refugees detained upon arrival in the wake of President Donald Trump’s latest executive order.

On Friday afternoon, Trump banned refugees from Syria indefinitely, suspended all refugee resettlement to the United States for 120 days, denied entry to citizens of seven predominantly Muslim nations (Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen), and reduced the number of refugees to be resettled this year by more than half. After nearly 19 hours of detention and a lawsuit filed on his behalf, Darweesh was released on Saturday. Countless others remain stuck in limbo.

While Trump’s executive order claims to be in the interest of “protecting the nation,” experts in national security and counterterrorism who spoke with Mother Jones argue that it poses potentially disastrous immediate and long-term security threats to the nation and US personnel overseas.

“Not only is it immoral and stupid, it’s also counterproductive,” says Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism case officer who now works at the Soufan Group, a security consulting firm. “We’ve got military, intelligence, and diplomatic personnel on the ground right now in Syria, Libya, and Iraq who are working side by side with the people, embedded in combat, and training and advising. At no time in the US’s history have we depended more on local—and I mean local—partnerships for counterterrorism. We need people in Al Bab, Syria; we depend on people in a certain part of eastern Mosul, Iraq; in Cert, Libya. At the exact moment we need them most, we’re telling these people, ‘Get screwed.'”

Kirk W. Johnson, who spent a year on the reconstruction in Fallujah in Iraq with the US Agency for International Development (USAID), echoes Skinner’s fears: “This will have immediate national security implications, in that we are not going to be able to recruit people to help us right now, and people are not going to step forward to help us in any future wars if this is our stance.”

The US-led war on ISIS is but one front in a constellation of fights against extremist groups that could be hampered by Trump’s decision. “The US is officially banning people in these countries at the same time we’re trying to build up local support to fight ISIS,” Skinner says. “It takes a long time to build trust with these people. This is like the Abu Ghraib thing. You have to start over, say, ‘Okay, starting now, trust me.’ How many times can you get away with that?” It also sends a message that groups like the so-called Islamic State can exploit. Elizabeth Goitein, the codirector of the Brennan Center’s Liberty & National Security Program, says, “The message this projects is that America sees Muslims as a threat—not specific actors who are intent on committing terrorist acts. The message that America really is at war with Islam will be ISIS’s best friend.”

BuzzFeed reporters Mike Giglio and Munzer Al-Awad spoke with five current or former ISIS fighters who cited Trump’s divisiveness as a factor that will weaken America. They added that his rhetoric against Muslims will help them reinforce their narrative that America and the West are fighting not just terrorism, but Islam itself. “Trump will shorten the time it takes for us to achieve our goals,” said one.

Meanwhile, the very allies who have operated alongside US personnel in war zones for years—contractors and translators like Darweesh—are once again being abandoned. For the past decade, Johnson has been leading an effort to resettle Iraqi allies, many of whom, he says, face torture, kidnapping, and death after collaborating with American soldiers. It all started in 2006 when he heard from an Iraqi USAID colleague who’d been identified by a militia. The militia left a severed pig’s head on his door step, along with a message saying that it would be his head next. Despite his years of helping the United States, the US government offered no help, and he had to flee the country with his wife.

Johnson discovered that there was no mechanism in place to help US allies like his colleague, and he began a personal crusade to change that. Since then, through legislation and a special immigrant visa platform, Johnson’s efforts have helped thousands reach the United States, but the process is cumbersome, long, and often too late for the people who need it most. Johnson speaks of interpreters “who were having legs shot off, cut off, their wives raped, their children abducted.” Some of his colleagues were even killed. And though Johnson has been critical of the process for years, now he’s in the “awkward position” of defending it, because it was at least better than shutting those allies out as a matter of policy.

Skinner, Johnson, and Goitein all point out that the executive order reads as if whoever wrote it had no understanding of, or done any work with, US refugee admissions programs. Indeed, a senior Department of Homeland Security official reportedly told NBC News that career State Department and DHS officials had no input in the order, saying, “Nobody has any idea what is going on.” Johnson says, “It reads as though 9/11 happened yesterday, and that 9/11 was carried out by refugees, which it wasn’t, and it creates a series of policy prescriptions to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, as if the stringent measures that have been put in place over the past 15 years to screen refugees don’t exist.”

Johnson, exasperated at the thought of US allies being turned away by the very country they spent years helping, adds, “These people who are directly and immediately impacted by this have done more to help our country than just about every breathing American has—especially the president. Shame is not a strong enough word for today. This is a disgraceful moment.”

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"Immoral," "Stupid," and "Counterproductive": National Security Experts Slam Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

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Trump’s Immigration Order May Have A Very Different Effect Than He Intended

by ElissaZIXe Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Here’s a chunk of President Trump’s executive order banning refugees:

The Secretary of State shall suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP) for 120 days….Upon the resumption of USRAP admissions, the Secretary of State, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, is further directed to make changes, to the extent permitted by law, 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. Where necessary and appropriate, the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security shall recommend legislation to the President that would assist with such prioritization.

In practice, the temporary suspension of the refugee program chiefly affects majority Muslim countries, which means that it’s designed to stop the flow of Muslim refugees into the US.

Or is it? I suspect that was indeed the intent, since the plight of Christian refugees has been a hobbyhorse on the right for years—something that Mike Pence is keenly aware of. But the actual data begs to differ. Here are the top ten countries that the United States accepted refugees from in 2016:

Syria gets all the attention, but the top refugee contributor was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is 80 percent Christian. Among the top ten countries, we accepted about 44,000 refugees from majority Muslim countries and 43,000 from other countries.

Likewise, once the 120-day suspension is over the “minority religion” provision will affect both Christians and Muslims relatively equally. Favoring Christian refugees may well have been the intent of this provision, but in practice it doesn’t actually seem to favor any particular religion. This was not what I expected when I decided to take a look at the data. But that’s what it shows.

POSTSCRIPT: Just in case it’s not obvious, I’m talking here only about refugee prioritization after Trump’s 120-day ban is up. Trump has also barred the entry of anyone from seven Muslim-majority countries for the next 90 days, and barred Syrian refugees indefinitely. Those are different provisions of his order, and they pretty obviously target Muslims.

Also, we’ll have to wait and see what orders the State Department issues at the end of the 120-day suspension. Right now we don’t know what they’ll do.

UPDATE: I got the refugee numbers wrong in the original version of this post. Both the chart and the text have been corrected.

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Trump’s Immigration Order May Have A Very Different Effect Than He Intended

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Here Comes The First Suit Challenging Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

by GaryBriscoe Posted on January 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Within hours of President Donald Trump signing his “Muslim ban” executive order Friday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations announced that it is about to file a lawsuit challenging the ban.

The order, called “Protection of the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” denies entry to the US to anyone from Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, according to CNN. The order also freezes refugee admissions for 120 days.

“There is no evidence that refugees—the most thoroughly vetted of all people entering our nation—are a threat to national security,” CAIR national litigation director Lena Masri said in a release. The group says it will announce details of the lawsuit Monday.

Demonstrators have been protesting the order ever since a draft was leaked on Wednesday.

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Here Comes The First Suit Challenging Trump’s "Muslim Ban"

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Russian Official Blames "Western Media" for Turkish Ambassador’s Assassination

by ild4sho Posted on December 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Russian Ambassador to Turkey Andrey Karlov was assassinated in an Ankara art gallery by a gunman who shouted, “Don’t forget Aleppo! Don’t forget Syria!”

Alexei Pushkov, a member of the Duma—the Russian legislature—and the former chairman of its foreign affairs committee, was quick to blame the Western media for inciting the attack through its coverage of Syria.

“The hysteria around Aleppo raised by the Western media has consequences,” he told LifeNews, a pro-Putin online news outlet and TV channel. “This murder is precisely a consequence of attempts to blame Russia for all the sins and crimes she did not commit. They are completely ignoring the crimes of fighters in Aleppo, and that forms a distorted and false picture of what is happening in this city, which contributed to this terrorist act…This is a result of anti-Russian hysteria, raised in the West and supported by a certain part of Turkish society.”

Pushkov made a similar point on his Twitter account, writing that “the death of the Russian ambassador in Turkey, a terrorist act, is the result of political and media hysteria around Aleppo from Russia’s enemies.”

Continued here: 

Russian Official Blames "Western Media" for Turkish Ambassador’s Assassination

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Trump: Election Is Rigged. Ryan: No It Isn’t.

by Romeo094963914 Posted on October 15, 2016

Mother Jones

Here is Donald Trump today in Maine talking about Hillary Clinton:

She wants 550 percent more coming from Syria than the thousands and thousands that our president, quote “president,” has coming in.

Charming, isn’t it? And if Obama isn’t a legitimate president, then Clinton won’t be either. Here is Trump in New Hampshire this morning:

Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the presidency—and the media, donors, special interests who support her will do everything they can to cling to their power and their prestige at your expense. You know it, I know it, they know it….Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted, and she should, right now, be in jail.

….It looks to me like a rigged election. The election is being rigged by corrupt people pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president….We can’t let them get away with this, folks….Remember this, it’s a rigged election….It’s a rigged election…It’s a rigged election.

Trump has been spinning up his supporters for weeks about this. If Clinton wins, she’ll be an illegitimate president. The election will be a sham. If the corrupt elites declare her the winner, don’t accept it. Fight back. In a sense, this is just standard Trump bluster. But it’s worse than that: this is banana republic talk, and with 24 days left in the campaign, Paul Ryan finally repudiated it:

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a rebuke of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump Saturday, criticizing comments that question the validity of the electoral process.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the highest-ranking elected Republican said Ryan is “fully confident” in the nation’s elections system. It comes on the heels of Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” against him by “globalist elites,” elements of the federal government, and the press. “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity,” said Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong.

This is a little late, but it’s still welcome.

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Trump: Election Is Rigged. Ryan: No It Isn’t.

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

by LannyFtflnztr Posted on October 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump has seemed content to cede leadership in Syria to Russia. But at Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence made a stunning about-face from his running mate’s position by saying the United States should stand up to Russia and even be willing to bomb the Syrian military to stop humanitarian disasters.

“If Russia…continues to be involved in this barbaric attack on civilians in Aleppo, the United States of America should be prepared to use military force to strike military targets of the Assad regime,” Pence said. It was part of a forceful case that the United States should stand up to Russia, which is a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Russian aircraft have flown bombing missions in Syria for the past year, killing almost 10,000 people in that time. Russia has also stepped up its air campaign in recent days in the city of Aleppo, killing several hundred civilians and destroying hospitals in the process. “The provocations by Russia need to be met with American strength,” Pence said.

Pence’s comments were by far the most hawkish ones made so far by either the Trump or Clinton campaigns. During the Republican primaries, Trump proposed putting 30,000 troops in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS. But he has also said that the US has “bigger problems than Assad” and has repeatedly called for working with Russia on an anti-ISIS campaign. “If we could get Russia to help us get rid of ISIS—if we could actually be friendly with Russia—wouldn’t that be a good thing?” he said at a rally this summer. Confronting the Syrian army and its Russian allies could lead to direct combat between US and Russian aircraft or US jets being shot down by recently placed Russian missiles.

Clinton is also seen as a Syria hawk. She has criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Syria and supports the creation of a no-fly-zone to protect Syrian civilians. That hawkishness has drawn criticism from other Democrats, and Marine Gen. Joe Dunford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned last month that a no-fly-zone could drag the United States into war with Russia. Kaine reiterated Clinton’s desire to create a “humanitarian zone” during Tuesday’s debate, but he pointedly avoided saying how a Clinton administration would enforce such safe areas and did not mention Clinton’s support for a no-fly-zone.

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Is Mike Pence Familiar With Donald Trump’s Position on Syria?

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