They will never answer them, they would have to first take their pudgy dirty fingers from their wax filled ears long enough to hear what’s being asked.
Nine questions those protesting against Donald Trump’s immigration ban must answer
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)?
