Supreme Court Upholds Trump travel ban – A bad news day

(c)Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

This is bad, bad, bad news for America.

In addition to upholding this Muslim ban, this court has also a) upheld racial gerrymandering in Texas and North Carolina (where voting boundaries are re-drawn, effectively making votes of minority voters less important) and b) upheld voter purging in Ohio allowing them to remove the names of people who haven’t voted for the past 2 years which is simply a form of voter suppression which tends to affect lower income and minorities more than any other group due to people moving more. In the past, in one county in Cincinatti, 10% of eligible African American voters were purged from the voter list!

This is all designed to disenfranchise brown and black people while at the same time promoting racist theories and ideas about which people are deemed to be dangerous and unworthy (ie Muslims), not to mention essentially trying to rig forthcoming elections.

It’s really very sad to see politics and the law being used in this way, taking the country back to a place that many millions fought for a long time to move on from. This is an endorsement of prejudice. It’s a thumbs up to discrimination. This is a BIG deal.

The culture war is in full effect, the corruption is real, and I genuinely shudder to think how much this ruling will embolden Trump and his ilk. Trump thrives on stuff like this.

I don’t really have words for this today, apart from that it’s just a damn shame and I actually literally feel quite sick about it. 😬😬😬

Welcome To America – Time Magazine

America 2018.

At times it can be hard to believe there’s light at the end of this Trump tunnel. Innocent children are being ripped away from their families, placed in detention centres and cages – yes, cages – like animals. There’s no regard to their well being and even worse, we don’t know how or if they will be reunited with their families. Just how much lower can this administration go?

So how to feel about all of this? It’s disturbing for sure. Maybe I’m being naïve when I say this but I believe that this is a period America must go through in order to get to a better place. It would be nice if it could become a culturally progressive nation in a matter of years, but anyone who has tried to change their lives just on a personal level knows that not only is change is hard, but it can sometimes be painful, even temporarily destructive.

So, in the context of a nation with a deep, long, and often nasty history, change is going to take longer than we want. We’re going to have to fight harder for longer against the shadow aspects of America’s psyche.

I feel for every person and every family that has had to bear the brunt of this immoral administration thus far. I hope that every child will be reunited with their parents, with minimal psychological trauma and damage. I applaud every single person involved in doing the right thing at whatever level. I wish I could do more.

What I will keep doing is keeping the faith, while facing facts. This shouldn’t be happening — but it is. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it always will. The reality is that many things – including demographics – are not on Trump and his people’s side. If demographics are destiny, they have already lost the culture/race war they are trying to fight, and at this point are trying to inflict maximum suffering in an attempt to claw their way back to a past that’s gone. It’s very sad to see, especially when decent and innocent people are getting caught in this attempt at a power grab. They don’t want us to think that way though. They want us to be overcome with fear, to be intimidated and to give up.

That’s why we must keep the bigger picture in mind and keep on doing whatever we can towards a better, brighter, more humane future, until these mofos and their backwards views are well and truly gone.
Stay strong. The fight goes on. ✊🏾

Lola in The New Statesman: The rise of anti-semitism in Trump’s America

Anti-Semitism is once again on the rise in America. Since January alone, there have been 67 bomb threats against Jewish Community Centres in around 27 states around the country. On Monday, a Jewish cemetery in St Louis, Missouri was desecrated, with over 100 headstones overturned. There has been a large increase in online anti-Semitic threats and hate speech. Swastikas have been spray painted on the streets of New York.

[Originally published in the New Statesman]

Trump’s poorly-executed “Muslim Ban” has closed the United States to people from seven majority-Muslim countries, including refugees from Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Somalia. But the divisive “them” and “us” rhetoric of the White House has had repercussions for other groups as well. 

Jewish people have not explicitly been the focus of any kind of executive order (after complaints about his lack of action, Trump called anti-Semitism “horrible”). Nevertheless, the new administrations appears to be implicitly pandering to anti-Jewish sentiment.

Take, for example, the official White House tribute issued on Holocaust Memorial Day in January. It failed to directly mention Jewish people at all. Jewish groups, including those representing Republicans, criticised the omission. Trump’s chief of staff Reince Priebus defended the statement, saying: “I mean, everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust, including, obviously, all of the Jewish people.”

Superficially, one could attribute this to ignorance. But how politicians phrase their words matters. It is a common tendency of anti-Semites to play down, ignore or reject the idea that the Holocaust was targeted at Jews. It is hard to believe that no one within the White House would have been aware of the kind of dog whistle this omission sent to the extreme right. 

That White House staff includes Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who was the executive chairman of Breitbart, viewed widely as the online news outlet of the “alt right”.

Timing also matters. The decision to shut US doors to Syrian and and Iraqi refugees was announced on Holocaust Memorial Day. The irony of an order singling people out for their faith wasn’t lost on Jewish groups, who know all too well how many German Jews fleeing the Nazis were turned away from other shores. 

Trump’s response time sent a message too. When a Hasidic Jewish reporter asked Trump about the growing anti-Semitism at his press conference on 16 February, he responded as if it was a personal attack, calling the question “very insulting” and telling him to sit down. Despite tweeting vociferously about Saturday Night Live and his daughter’s clothing line being dropped by a department store, Trump only managed to issue a statement condemning anti-Semitism on Tuesday.

David Samuels is a prominent Jewish writer living in Brooklyn, New York. He told me: “American Jews are threatened by rising anti-Semitism on both the right and left, which FBI statistics show to be more serious and more deadly than any animus directed towards Muslims or any other religious group.

“I feel sad that this is now my country, not because I am Jewish but because anti-Semitism is a degenerative thought-virus that makes people crazy by promising to explain everything that happens in the world with reference to a single prime mover – the Jews.

“Because anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory, and not a form of social prejudice, it is fatal to rational thinking, in a way that simple racial or religious prejudice – including prejudice against Jews – is not.”

Whatever the intentions of the Trump administration, the reaction in the country at large shows it is playing with fire. Americans must hope that Trump, who has three Jewish grandchildren, will come to his senses and rid his support base of any who seek to use the presidency to infect the country with their diabolical ideology.

President Obama’s Statement on Supreme Court Ruling on Arizona Immigration law

Although there are still some very serious concerns about some of the parts of Arizona’s controversial immigration law that have been allowed to remain, I’m really pleased to hear that the Supreme Court has mostly rejected the law. The Court’s basic premise (you can read their judgement in full here) is that  the federal government, not the state, has the final authority on such law. In my view, this is a smack down not only to Arizona but to other states who had been watching the results of this case closely in the hope of emulating it. This would perhaps encourage them to seek better solutions. It also partially (certainly not fully) reigns in possible abuses of power when it comes to how undocumented immigrants are treated. What is discouraging, however, is that police are still allowed to check the immigration status of those they suspect to be illegal. This seems to give a thumbs up to racial profiling.

See President Obama’s statement in full below.

Statement by the President on the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Arizona v. the United States

I am pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration law.  What this decision makes unmistakably clear is that Congress must act on comprehensive immigration reform.  A patchwork  of state laws is not a solution to our broken immigration system – it’s part of the problem.

At the same time, I remain concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally.  I agree with the Court that individuals cannot be detained solely to verify their immigration status.  No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like.  Going forward, we must ensure that Arizona law enforcement officials do not enforce this law in a manner that undermines the civil rights of Americans, as the Court’s decision recognizes.  Furthermore, we will continue to enforce our immigration laws by focusing on our most important priorities like border security and criminals who endanger our communities, and not, for example, students who earn their education – which is why the Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this month that it will lift the shadow of deportation from young people who were brought to the United States as children through no fault of their own.

I will work with anyone in Congress who’s willing to make progress on comprehensive immigration reform that addresses our economic needs and security needs, and upholds our tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.  And in the meantime, we will continue to use every federal resource to protect the safety and civil rights of all Americans, and treat all our people with dignity and respect. We can solve these challenges not in spite of our most cherished values – but because of them.  What makes us American is not a question of what we look like or what our names are.  What makes us American is our shared belief in the enduring promise of this country – and our shared responsibility to leave it more generous and more hopeful than we found it.