Vox: What most Americans get wrong about Islamophobia

Essentially, it’s that even though Islamophobia animates a modern form of bigotry ... the essence of the hate is not new. It’s deeply rooted in American political discourse. It’s deeply rooted in American law. It’s deeply rooted in American framings of who was a citizen and who was not. But it’s been given a new face — a new caricature — as a consequence of the war on terror, and then intensified by the rhetoric of, mainly, President Trump. [...]

Yeah, definitely. Islamophobia, largely on account of it being so closely tied and tethered to Trump, is caricatured as exclusively a form of hate that comes from people on the right. We almost conflate Islamophobia with right-wing politics, which is really simplistic. It glosses over the idea that you have individuals on the left engaging in and propagating Islamophobia. [...]

Islamophobia intersects with Black Lives Matter in dynamic and distinct ways. A large number of African Americans are Muslim; we know that anywhere between 25 and 33 percent of the entire Muslim population here, in the states, [is] black. When we think about violent policing, we think about these issues that the Black Lives Matter movement has committed to addressing and dismantling.

I think it’s also important to frame Islamophobia as another aspect of white supremacy. Specifically, war on terror programming, when we think about the state-sponsored Islamophobic programs that I talk about in the book, whether it be counter-radicalization in the Patriot Act, the Muslim ban, and so on.

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Vox:Study suggests Trump’s “Muslim ban” actually improved attitudes toward Muslims

When President Donald Trump announced his “Muslim ban” barring visitors and would-be refugees alike from six majority-Muslim countries early last year, critics worried it might prompt an additional wave of Islamophobia across the United States, intensifying the anti-Islamic sentiments that had been a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign. [...]

The authors found that the national discourse about the Muslim ban — and a general sense from liberal and mainstream media that the policy was at odds with “American values” — prompted some respondents to shift their attitudes, ultimately causing many Americans who had previously supported or been neutral on the issue of Trump’s Muslim ban to come down against it. [...]

This is striking in part because, according to the study’s authors, sudden significant shifts in public opinion tend to be rare. Second, those whose views shifted most radically were those who cited their identity as Americans as a major part of their self-conception overall. This suggests that public debate that centered on the Muslim ban being “un-American,” or otherwise counter to American values of openness and hospitality toward foreigners, had contributed to this shift. Write the study’s authors:

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Politico: Why Bannon lost and the globalists won

In an alternate timeline, Bannon could have encouraged Trump to avoid such racially divisive matters in his first week, as well as steer clear of the always politically treacherous health care debate, and put all his weight behind that trillion-dollar infrastructure plan. Top Democrats had been signaling to Trump since the election that they were open to an infrastructure deal, which need not violate their ideological principles. If there was any chance to erase the old partisan lines and start the new administration with a policy win, this was it. But Bannon apparently didn’t try or wasn’t able to stop Republicans from placing the ill-fated Obamacare repeal at the top of the domestic policy agenda. [...]

Bannon was clearly enamored of proposals that challenged partisan orthodoxy, such as when he floated a new 44 percent top tax rate for incomes above $5 million. But he had no capacity to follow through. His trial balloons were laughed off by conservatives, and his association with the “alt-right” made him a toxic negotiating partner for the left. Bannon’s nemesis, economic adviser Gary Cohn, meanwhile, built up a relatively competent team that ran circles around the poorly staffed former Breitbart chairman. [...]

Bannon crowed this week that “identity politics” is a loser for Democrats. But his own obsession with identity led him to shelve infrastructure in favor of the travel ban, and arguably racial grievance among whites also fueled the passion to repeal Obamacare. The focus on playing to the white conservative base culminated in Trump’s rationalizing the violent behavior of white supremacists and seeking the protection of Confederate war memorials. All this has poisoned the well. Trump is now irredeemable in the minds of most Democrats and most nonwhite voters, no matter what he offers on infrastructure, trade or taxes.

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Vox: An atheist Muslim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam

Rizvi’s book is partly a plea for secularism and partly a defense of Islam as a culture. It’s also an internal challenge to Islam as a body of doctrines. Rizvi speaks directly to agnostics, atheists, and humanists living in the Muslim world, enjoining them to embrace secular culture without abandoning their Muslim identity. [...]

I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims. When Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson say something that's homophobic or misogynistic, people on the left descend on them like a ton of bricks. They’re very comfortable with criticizing and satirizing fundamentalist Christianity. But when it comes to Islam, which has many of the same homophobic and misogynistic teachings, they throw their hands up, back off, and say, whoa, hold on, we must respect their religion and culture. [...]

But this still doesn’t take away from the point. It still stands that religion — and I say religion in general this time because while Islam is especially dangerous today, the other Abrahamic religions have served the same purpose when they were — lends itself extremely well to the goals and whims of authoritarians, tyrants, and the violent everywhere, whether it’s being used as a prop or driving them by belief. [...]

One thing Christians and Jews don’t always understand, because it’s hard to relate to, is that most Muslims do revere their holy text very differently from them. It’s not just divinely inspired or written by men of God. It is written by God himself, every letter, every punctuation mark. It’s literal, and it’s infallible. You can’t even touch the book unless you’ve performed an ablution ritual. It’s very serious. [...]

I say that the first step to reform in Islam is rejection of infallibility. This seems outrageous to some. They say it’ll never happen. But it has happened in the past. Reform Jews today make up a majority of American Jews. None of them believe the Torah is the literal word of God anymore. But for a long time, that was the deal — the Torah was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle like the Quran was to Muhammad starting in the Cave of Hira at Mecca. It was error-free. Suggesting otherwise was blasphemy — and look up Leviticus 24:16 to learn the consequences of that.

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Vox: Donald Trump's refugee ban, explained

The Supreme Court allowed a partial version of Trump's executive order banning travel from 6 Muslim-majority countries to go into effect this summer. But the full order could have a lasting impact on how the US treats refugees.

Reveal: Home is where the hate is

From January 2008 to the end of 2016, we identified 63 cases of Islamist domestic terrorism, meaning incidents motivated by a theocratic political ideology espoused by such groups as the Islamic State. The vast majority of these (76 percent) were foiled plots, meaning no attack took place.

During the same period, we found that right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents: 115. Just over a third of these incidents (35 percent) were foiled plots. The majority were acts of terrorist violence that involved deaths, injuries or damaged property.

Right-wing extremist terrorism was more often deadly: Nearly a third of incidents involved fatalities, for a total of 79 deaths, while 13 percent of Islamist cases caused fatalities. (The total deaths associated with Islamist incidents were higher, however, reaching 90, largely due to the 2009 mass shooting at Fort Hood in Texas.) [...]

More than a million violent crimes are committed each year in the United States, while annual domestic terrorism incidents number in the dozens. Yet acts of terrorism have a special significance, said former FBI agent Michael German, because each one not only targets particular victims, but also “is an attack on civil society itself.” [...]

While a majority of the incidents were perpetrated by right-wing extremists (57 percent), the database indicates that federal law enforcement agencies focused their energies on pre-empting and prosecuting Islamist attacks, which constituted 31 percent of all incidents, a finding confirmed by counterterror experts. [...]

Yet even though most Islamists were charged only in connection with plots, they often were sentenced as harshly as or more harshly than right-wing extremists, who mostly succeeded in committing acts of terror. Among the Islamist cases, 8 percent got life sentences, 2 percent got death sentences, and the average sentence for the other cases was 21 years in prison. Among far-right cases, 12 percent got life sentences, 5 percent got death sentences, and the average sentence for the rest was eight years.

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Vox: How Steve Bannon sees the world (Feb 14, 2017)

Vox: Even the Trump administration doesn’t seem to care about the travel ban anymore

When the travel ban was first put on hold in February, it was a symbol of the haste and carelessness with which an underprepared and understaffed administration had leapt into the job. When the revised version was put out in March, it was the keystone of an administration effort to reboot a flailing policy agenda. And when that version was put on hold, on the evening before it was due to go into effect, it was a reminder that the divisive populism of the Trump candidacy would inevitably haunt the Trump presidency. [...]

The Trump administration — and Trump himself — has shown very little ability to redirect public attention. It looks, for all the world, as if the travel ban has fallen out of mind for the White House because it’s fallen out of sight of national TV news. Because at this point, the news doesn’t react to Donald Trump as much as Donald Trump reacts to the news. [...]

The daily rhythm of political life under the Trump administration is no longer driven by what the White House says or does, or what happens to it. It’s driven by the constant churn of scoops, leaks, denials, and revelations, as new connections between team Trump and the Russian government come to light and government investigations scramble to (or are stonewalled from) getting to the bottom of it. [...]

For all of Donald Trump’s griping about his communications staff, Trump himself appears to be fundamentally unable to direct even his own attention to the things his administration actually wants to do for America, much less the attention of anyone else. His obsession with the way his presidency is covered has deprived him of any chance to change it.

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CityLab: An Old Segregation Battle Meets the ‘Muslim Ban’

On Monday, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments on President Donald Trump’s revised executive order banning the entry of visitors from six Muslim-majority countries, and temporarily suspending refugee admissions. The government’s counsel argued to reinstate the ban, which has been blocked by lower courts, citing a 1970 Supreme Court ruling that essentially condoned Jackson, Mississippi’s refusal to integrate its public swimming pools.

To understand the link between the two cases, let’s step back for a moment into post-Civil Rights Act America, when public pools were arenas for the backlash against integration. In Jackson, instead of integrating its pools, as the law required, the city council decided to close them down entirely. Their argument, that racially diverse pools would jeopardize public safety, was a common stance of municipalities holding on to the last dregs of segregation—and it’s one that endures today. In 1960s Jackson, African American residents sued, and when the lower courts ruled in favor of the city, the matter was taken up by the Supreme Court.  [...]

Today, the Trump administration is asking the court to apply that same standard: judging the travel ban on its face while ignoring the president’s motives for signing it. In International Refugee Assistance Project ("IRAP") v. Trump, civil liberties lawyers representing the plaintiffs have pointed to the president’s explicit call for the “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States,” and his allies’ statements confirming that goal. In their view, this is clear evidence that the order has been fueled by an animus against Muslims, rather than a benign concern for national security—and that’s why it should be blocked. Lower courts have agreed.

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The Atlantic: A Better Way to Argue About Politics

Liberals and conservatives have fundamentally different moral codes, which makes arguing about policy complicated. Many people have found themselves locked in debates surrounding the now-suspended travel ban, with little success in convincing the other. “One reason it’s so hard to reach across the ideological divide is that people tend to present their arguments in a way that appeals to the ethics of their own side, rather than that of their opponents,” says Atlantic writer Olga Khazan in this video. However, there’s a psychological trick that goes a long way to changing peoples minds. According to the Moral Foundations Theory, liberals are more likely than conservatives to endorse fairness-based arguments and are more concerned with principles like care and equality. So, when discussing a contentious topic, liberals should reframe their arguments to appeal the the moral values of conservatives, and vice versa. “At the very least, you can avoid making things worse,” says Khazan. “If you can’t reframe your argument, just get off Facebook.”

This is the seventh episode of “Unpresidented,” an original series from The Atlantic exploring a new era in American politic

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The Intercept: Her Father Championed Jewish Refugees. She Finances the Anti-Muslim Refugee Movement.

Rosenwald is the founder, president, and primary benefactor of the Gatestone Institute, one of the loudest groups agitating against Muslim migration. Her foundation has also generously funded far-right voices that have opposed accepting refugees, including Robert Spencer of the blog Jihad Watch; Frank Gaffney, an anti-Muslim activist known for spreading anti-Muslim conspiracies so far-fetched he was banned from CPAC, the popular conservative convention; and Zuhdi Jasser, a controversial Muslim pundit who argued that President Donald Trump has not done enough in vetting Muslim migrants. [...]

But Gatestone Institute has no illusions about the religious motivations behind the ban. “Muslims need to know that the world does indeed have a justifiable and legitimate concern about Islam and actions done in the name of Islam by Muslims,” wrote Nonie Darwish, explaining her support of the executive order, in a piece for the Gatestone Institute. [...]

Rosenwald’s family philanthropy goes back to her grandfather, Julius, who founded Sears and went on to spend his wealth to save Jewish families from pogroms in Russia and on schools for African-American children in the South. Her father, William, served as president of the United Jewish Appeal, the Joint Distribution Committee, and founded the National Refugee Service, touring the country to raise funds for resettling Jews fleeing Nazi terror in Europe. William was a committed supporter of Israel. That advocacy dovetails with his daughter’s current work as a supporter of pro-Israel organizations such as AIPAC.

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America Magazine: Pope Francis to activists: Stand with migrants, do not deny climate science, there is no such thing as ‘Islamic terrorism’

Francis condemned leaders who rely on “fear, insecurity, quarrels, and even people’s justified indignation, in order to shift the responsibility for all these ills onto a ‘non-neighbor.’

”Though he wrote in the letter that he was not speaking about any particular leaders but of “a social and political process that flourishes in many parts of the world” that “poses a grave danger for humanity,” the letter, delivered in a border state with a large Hispanic population, is sure to suggest tensions between church leaders and U.S. President Donald J. Trump.

Last year, the pope said political leaders who propose building border walls were not Christian, a statement interpreted by the Trump campaign as a slight against the candidate. [...]

“There are fundamentalist and violent individuals in all peoples and religions—and with intolerant generalizations they become stronger because they feed on hate and xenophobia,” he continued.

Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized his predecessor for refusing to label acts of terror committed by Muslims “radical Islamic terrorism,” a phrase he has used often since his election.

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CityLab: Are Refugees Dangerous?

But there is a substantial body of fact-based evidence on the links between refugee populations and crime in U.S. cities. The latest addition to this field of study comes from an analysis by the Partnership for a New American Economy, a consortium of bipartisan political and business leaders for immigration reform. [...]

Their analysis revealed that after refugees moved in, crime usually went down. Nine out of ten cities on the list saw their property and violent crime levels decline—some by drastic amounts. In Southfield, Michigan (in bright green), for example, violent crime dropped by 77 percent between 2006 and 2015. Decatur, Georgia (in bright green), which lies outside Atlanta, saw a 62.2 percent decrease between 2007 and 2015. The lone exception was West Springfield, Massachusetts (in grey), which experienced a significant rise in crime during this time. But the town was a hotbed of opioid drug-related crime even before the refugee resettlement happened. [...]

If not local crime, what about the threat of terrorism? Over at the Lawfare blog, Nora Ellington, a Harvard Law student who previously worked as an analyst at the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, took a deep dive into the data. Since January 1, 2015, the FBI arrested four refugees on terrorism-related charges, two of whom were from countries on Trump’s list. Omar Faraj Saeed Al Hardan came to the U.S. from Iraq in 2009 and was charged with “providing material support” to the Islamic State. Iraqi-born Aws Mohammed Younis Al-Jayab came from Syria in 2012. Per the Justice Department, he went back there for a few months in 2013 and 2014 to fight alongside terrorist groups.

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Vox: Why Iran’s supreme leader just thanked Trump for his Muslim ban

On Tuesday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had a rather counterintuitive response: gratitude.

Khamenei said that he considers the opening weeks of Trump’s administration to be a revelation of America’s true character, and was grateful for how it made plain impulses that have typically laid beneath the surface of American policy. [...]

Khamenei’s rhetoric is a prime example of how the US’s political adversaries in the Middle East can easily use Trump’s Islamophobic rhetoric and policies as a tool for recruiting and mobilizing against him. And indeed, Khamenei did just that on Tuesday:

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The New Yorker: Our Part in the Darkness

I remember when the photographs of torture at Abu Ghraib came to light. The response was similar. This is not us. Those soldiers were rotten. It began at the top, with George W. Bush, and it filtered down. But we would never do such a thing. Of course, we did do those things, and we kept on doing them over and over, and doing worse. Some objected, but most of us simply moved on, chose to forget. “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible,” the Polish poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec once wrote.

Trump bans Muslims and we claim that this is un-American, that we are not this. I don’t have to talk up “ancient” history to show that we are. I won’t bring up settler colonialism, genocide, and land theft, or harp on slavery, or internment camps for Japanese-Americans. I won’t refer to the Page Act banning those deemed “undesirable,” the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, or the Emergency Quota Act. I don’t have to mention the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans deported in the nineteen-thirties, or the thousands of Jews escaping Nazi violence who were turned away. It was F.D.R., not Trump, who claimed that Jewish immigrants could threaten national security. I won’t mention any of this, because this happened so long ago. We can always delude ourselves by saying that America was this but now we are better. Let me just say that in 2010 and 2011, state legislatures passed a hundred and sixty-four anti-immigration laws.

Many were upset when Trump campaigned on a Muslim registry, but I was surprised to find out how few knew that we’d already had one: the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or nseers, implemented on September 11, 2002. From the Atlantic: “It consisted of two ‘special registration’ programs: one that required foreign nationals from certain countries to check in with the government before entering and leaving the country, and another that obliged some foreigners living in the United States to report regularly to immigration officials.” Obama did not suspend the program until 2011. He dismantled it right before he left office.

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Al Jazeera: Trump aide mocked after 'Bowling Green massacre' lie

Kellyane Conway, a key adviser to US President Donald Trump, has come under fire after defending an order barring entry to citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries by blaming two Iraqi refugees for a "massacre" that never occurred.

Conway on Thursday night told the US news channel MSNBC that the media had failed to cover the "Bowling Green Massacre", which she claimed was the reason that former president Barack Obama's administration stopped accepting refugees for six months in 2011.  [...]

Conway had previously coined the phrase "alternative facts" when justifying the White House's unsubstantiated claim that Trump's inauguration ceremony had the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, both in person and around the globe".

Later on Friday, Conway tweeted that she meant to say "Bowling Green terrorists", but Twitter users were quick to point out that those words would not fit properly in her statement.

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Foreign Affairs: Don't Fear Muslim Immigrants

Trump is tapping into a deep-rooted fear. It is the same fear that sustains the popularity of many extreme right-wing parties throughout Europe, from France’s National Front to Greece’s Golden Dawn. It is thus legitimate to ask whether the recent wave of immigration into Europe and the United States from Muslim-majority countries is compromising the safety of host populations. But the evidence suggests that the fears are misguided: Liberal democracies are not opening their doors to terrorism when they let in Muslim immigrants. [...]

By studying a population of Senegalese Christian and Muslim immigrants from the Serer and Joola religiously mixed communities who migrated to France under identical conditions, we found that Muslim immigrants face greater discrimination in the labor market, earn less monthly income, express less attachment to their host country, and exhibit greater attachment to their country of origin than do their Christian counterparts. And these patterns do not improve in subsequent generations. The cause of this failure of integration is twofold: Islamophobia on the part of French society and Muslim immigrants’ tendency to identify more with their home communities in response. As a result, Europe is creating a class of under-employed immigrants who feel little or no connection with their host societies.

But linking Muslim immigration to terrorism is a mistake. Liberal societies should not condemn people simply for having the same cultural background as murderous criminals. (It would be as ludicrous as blaming all Italian-Americans for mafia killings.) Moreover, the obsession with Muslim immigration focuses on the wrong targets. Terrorists tend not to be poor, uneducated, or even, in many cases, of Muslim heritage. Olivier Roy, an expert on Islam, has used data from France’s “S File”—the French government’s antiterrorism watch list—to create an evidence-based portrait of today’s French jihadists. French jihadists are for the most part either second-generation French citizens—the children of relatively non-religious immigrants, who were born and raised in France—or native French converts—French citizens with no immigrant background who have converted to Islam. What unifies these two groups is not Islam; it is a sense of generational revolt. Similarly, among Western recruits who join the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), a disproportionate number are converts to Islam. This is why Roy describes the threat not as the radicalization of Islam but as the Islamization of radicalism.

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The New Yorker: Pope Francis Is the Anti-Trump

Last week, the Grand Master knelt, symbolically yielding his sword to the Pope. Fra’ Matthew Festing, a Brit, had been embroiled in a nasty squabble with an underling, Grand Chancellor Albrecht Freiherr von Boeselager, a German, whom Festing fired for allowing the Order’s charity to distribute condoms in Myanmar—a violation of Catholic practice. The details of the dispute matter less than Pope Francis’s firm intervention on the side of Boeselager, who, after Festing’s resignation, was reinstated. Defenders of the Order objected to the papal intrusion, calling it a violation of sovereignty—and with condoms at issue, many also caught a whiff of the Pontiff’s liberalizing incense. Conservatives, as usual, gagged. (Ross Douthat, for example, saw a “characteristic move of the papacy” of which he famously disapproves.) Traditionalists have become increasingly peeved with Francis since last November, when he released the encyclical “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”), which seemed to provide an opening for divorced and remarried Catholics to be readmitted to the sacraments. The conservative Order of Malta is not to be confused with anything having to do with the actual island nation, a fact underscored last month when the Catholic bishops of Malta, appealing to “Amoris Laetitia,” declared that a separated or divorced person “at peace with God” cannot be denied communion. [...]

Burke’s opposition to Pope Francis is as much geopolitical as it is theological. Pope Francis is, at this point, the world’s staunchest defender of migrants, and of Muslim migrants. A year ago, in a gesture widely understood to be a rebuttal to Donald Trump, he went to the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border, and on his flight back to Rome said expressly of Trump, “A person who thinks only of building walls … is not Christian.” On Inauguration Day, Francis sent “cordial good wishes” to Trump, but added that America’s “stature” depended on “above all its concern for the poor, the outcast, and those in need who, like Lazarus, stand before our door.”

The American prelate who most closely resembles Francis in thought and style is Blase J. Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, whom Francis made a cardinal only days after the U.S. election. This week, in a resounding rebuke to Trump, Cupich described the President’s executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations as “a dark moment in U.S. history.” The Catholic Church, despite retaining some of the trappings, costumes, and mental habits of the past thousand years, has left its war with Islam behind. The West seemed to have done so long ago, but now, with the West at war with itself (a match to the intra-Islam conflict), the questions have returned. Who are the faithful? Who are the infidels? Who would have thought that, on an elemental point of liberal democracy, the United States could take instruction from the white-robed man in Rome? And who would have thought that liberal democracy itself could have a stake in the unfinished struggle for the soul of the Catholic Church?

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Vox: Why Trump's "Muslim ban" is a moral failure, explained by a political theorist

I think there are at least three overlapping bases for these obligations. The first is that the US is sometimes responsible for the fact that someone has become a refugee. For example, people in Iraq and Afghanistan who have helped American forces by serving as translators or in other capacities have sometimes been put at risk because of this service. There are already stories of such people being excluded from admission (and hence, safety) as a result of Trump’s policy.

The second basis for the obligation to refugees is simply the humanitarian duty to help people in desperate straits when one can do so. This duty has its roots in many different religious and secular ethical traditions. The United States has traditionally admitted more refugees than any other country (although Germany has clearly passed the US in this respect in the past few years). The complete ban on refugee admissions for four months and the subsequent reduction (by half) of the number who will be accepted is a failure to meet America’s humanitarian obligations.

The third basis for the obligation to refugees is that the United States and most other countries have acknowledged that the international state system has a duty to protect refugees. In the wake of the failure of democratic states to protect Jewish refugees from the Nazis, the United States led the effort to create institutions that would prevent such a moral failure in the future. That regime already suffers from severe limitations, and the new Trump policy will undermine it further. [...]

First, in imposing restrictions on entry that take immediate effect, it violates norms of fairness. As everyone knows, the policy has stranded people abroad who had already been living in the United States as well as people who had been given permission to come and had made life plans on that basis. To deprive people of a right to enter the United States that they had previously been granted and which they have done nothing to forfeit is unfair. [...]

Second, the policy violates the moral principle that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of religion. The seven states whose citizens are not permitted entry are all overwhelmingly Muslim. Trump himself has implicitly acknowledged that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of religion by denying that he is doing so. This recalls the old saying that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. In this case, however, the hypocrisy is so blatant, given Trump’s past and present statements about Islam, that no one who cares about reality can take his protestations seriously. This policy is clearly and deliberately aimed at restricting the entry of Muslims.

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The Atlantic: Where America's Terrorists Actually Come From

But after sifting through databases, media reports, court documents, and other sources, Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, has arrived at a striking finding: Nationals of the seven countries singled out by Trump have killed zero people in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2015.

Zero.

Six Iranians, six Sudanese, two Somalis, two Iraqis, and one Yemeni have been convicted of attempting or executing terrorist attacks on U.S. soil during that time period, according to Nowrasteh’s research. (Nowrasteh focused on plots against the U.S. homeland, which presumably Trump cares most about, rather than other terrorism-related offenses, like supporting a foreign terrorist group or trying to join a jihadist organization overseas.) Zero Libyans and zero Syrians have been convicted of doing the same. “Foreign-born terrorism is a hazard,” Nowrasteh argues, “but it is manageable given the huge economic benefits of immigration and the small costs of terrorism.” [...]

Still, it’s worth noting that the countries at the top of the list, including Saudi Arabia and Egypt, are not included in Trump’s ban. I’ve bolded the countries included in Trump’s executive order.

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