Trump expected to sign EO targeting refugees on Wednesday

[The_Doctor]

Once again, banning Muslim refugees here is terrible foreign policy. If there was an actual good reason to ban Muslim refugees from Syria I'd be all for it! I after all DO agree there is a war on Radical Islam and we need to win it.

BUT once again we need allies to win this war. We can't just go "OH BAD MOOSLIM, EVERYONE STAY AWAY!" This is a religion of 2.6 billion adherents. Billion, with a b. Now, what happens when you tell an entire faith they're bad people? They get radicalized. They join the people who share their faith or x characteristic. They become tribalistic. They get ticked off. They decide opposing you is now part of their identity and path to survival.

Unless you're willing to nuke Medina and Mecca, antagonizing an entire faith is stupid foreign policy.

So, we need Muslim allies to isolate and win the war on Radical Islam. So, when you turn away families who are fleeing the very radical Islamists we are trying to kill, defeat, whatever, you end up making them vastly less sympathetic to your cause and more willing to listen to crazy people who might be willing to strike a deal.

This is not constructive foreign policy. The few minor incidents that come from stupid idiots that exist in every population subgroup are vastly outweighed by the support of the vast majority of law abiding refugees who will do the following (1) communicate their gratitude to their Middle Eastern relatives (2) communicate that the Islamists are the real enemy, not the West 3) communicate that we need to all stand united.

This is why George W. Bush was careful to not isolate Muslims in the days after 9/11. So, in a nutshell, this is a retarded policy that will come back to bite us in the posterior.  

[The_Doctor]

+1 Devout Centrist's remarks.

Fundamentally, I think the Right has lost its mind over Islamophobia. Bush 43 was actually fairly good on this issue and struck a balance between killing terrorists while respecting Muslims. In the subsequent decade, Republicans have just jettisoned that balance in favor of an indiscriminate brush to declare war on Islam, as if it was Japan 1941 writ large.