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In a major scoop said to put a “stake in the heart of the Muslim ban,” MSNBC‘s Rachel Maddow reported Thursday evening on a new leaked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analysis which essentially shreds the Trump administration’s rationale for banning travel from seven Muslim-majority nations. The document, prepared by DHS’ internal intelligence agency, the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, concludes that the majority of foreign-born, U.S.-based violent extremists were radicalized several years after their entry into the U.S.

The Washington Post‘s Greg Sargent on Friday suggested that the leaked analysis could be part of the “real reason for the delay,” rather than the stated reason of not wanting to sully the warm reception received by the president after his joint-session speech Tuesday evening. “The Trump administration can’t solve the problem that has always bedeviled this policy, which is that there isn’t any credible national security rationale for it,” he wrote. “Unlike on the campaign trail, when you’re governing, you actually have to have justification for what you’re proposing, or you often run into trouble.” Similarly, Maddow observed that “they really do have a problem here,” pointing to the document’s key finding, which states that “most foreign-born, U.S.-based violent extremists are likely radicalized several years after their entry to the United States, limiting the ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their entry because of national security concerns.” “The national security justification for this whole ban—this setting up of extreme vetting—is bull-pucky,” Maddow said. “There’s nothing they can set up at the border to tell you years down the road who might become…a radical and violent person years from now.” This latest leak follows the release of another DHS analysis last week that similarly undermined the Trump administration’s claim that people traveling from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and Somalia pose a severe threat to the United States. That document, obtained by the Associated Press, concluded that “citizenship is an ‘unlikely indicator’ of terrorism threats to the United States and that few people from the countries Trump listed in his travel ban have carried out attacks or been involved in terrorism-related activities in the U.S. since Syria’s civil war started in 2011,” as AP reported. Taken together, the two documents throw cold water on most of the administration’s stated justification for the pending executive order.

Who exactly was Donald Trump appealing to when he called on Monday for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Quite a few people, according to a YouGov poll conducted earlier this year which found that 55% of surveyed Americans had an “unfavorable” opinion of Islam. Looking more closely at those respondents, Islamophobic sentiments are more common among Americans who are 45 and older, those who are Republican and those who are white.

Attitudes toward Islam and attitudes toward Muslims should be considered separately – however, studies suggests that the two overlap considerably, as many people fail to distinguish between the two. In 2014, Pew Research Center published a large study about American attitudes towards individuals of different faiths. Over 3,000 US respondents were asked to rate members of religious groups using a “feeling thermometer” that ranged from 0 to 100: 0 indicated the coldest, most negative possible rating and 100 the warmest, most positive rating. Muslims scored just 40. That score excludes Muslim respondents’ views about other Muslims. The only other group to fare similarly badly were atheists as rated by religious respondents – they too scored 40. There is however an important difference between those two scores: there are far more atheists in America than there are Muslims. Since the Census Bureau is prohibited by law from asking about religious affiliation, Pew surveys are the main source on America’s religious makeup. Their 2015 data shows that 3% of Americans identify as atheist (as well as 4% who say they’re agnostic and 16% who say they’re nothing in particular). By contrast, just under 1% of Americans identify as Muslim – although estimates vary widely and are partly dependent on Muslims’ willingness to identify with the label to interviewers.

Those two percentages – the number of Americans who dislike Muslims and the number of Americans who are Muslim – suggest that Trump would not have had the same receptive audience had he singled out members of any other religious group. So far, much of Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric has focused on security. That’s smart. When Brits were asked this year what words they think of when they hear the word Muslim, their most common responses were “terror”, “terrorism” and “terrorist”. It’s also relevant that when individuals (again often white, often Republican) were trying to undermine Barack Obama’s credibility in 2004 and claim that he could not be trusted, they said he was a secret Muslim. What sounded like an accusation only increased in frequency once Obama became a presidential candidate. As of September this year, 29% of Americans (and 43% of Republicans) still believe that Obama is a Muslim, according to a poll by CNN and the Opinion Research Corporation.

As international condemnation of Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump's proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US snowballs, the White House has called for Trump to be disqualified from the presidential race and urged Republican candidates to reject him. Trump called for blocking Muslims -- including prospective immigrants, students, tourists and other visitors -- from entering the US following a shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, by a Muslim couple whom authorities said had been radicalized. The White House lambasted Trump's proposal for the ban, maintaining on Tuesday that Trump's outburst disqualified him from becoming president and called on Republican Party presidential hopefuls to disavow him with immediate effect. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Trump's campaign had a "dustbin of history" quality to it and said his comments were offensive and toxic, according to Reuters. "If they are so cowed by Mr. Trump and his supporters that they're not willing to stand by the values enshrined in the Constitution, then they have no business serving as president of the United States themselves," Earnest said, according to The Associated Press (AP).

The Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense, warned on Tuesday that Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric undermines US national security, especially fueling the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant's (ISIL) narrative of a US war with Islam. Asked about Trump's remarks, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said Muslims serve in the US armed forces and that America's war strategy to combat the Islamic State hinged on support from Muslim countries, according to a Reuters report. “Anything that bolsters ISIL's narrative and pits the United States against the Muslim faith is certainly not only contrary to our values but contrary to our national security,” Cook told a news briefing, refraining to mention Trump by name. US Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said Trump's proposal could thwart US efforts to connect with the Muslim community and Secretary of State John Kerry said his ideas were not constructive. The Pentagon counts thousands of service members who self-identify as Muslims. Data released by the US Defense Department showed that 3,817 active-duty members and 2,079 members of the National Guard and reserve identified their faith as “Islam.” However the real number could well be higher as the identifications are voluntary.

UN secretary-general strongly opposes Trump comments UN spokesman Farhan Haq said recently UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon strongly opposes Trump's call for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. Haq said the secretary-general has repeatedly spoken out against all forms of xenophobia and statements against migrants, racial or religious groups "and that would certainly apply in this case." While political campaigns have their own dynamics, Haq said, according to AP, “we do not believe that any kind of rhetoric that relies on Islamaphobia, xenophobia, any other appeal to hate any groups, really should be followed by anyone.”

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) said in an interview on Saturday that President Trump had previously asked him about legally implementing a "Muslim ban."But Giuliani then disputed the notion that the president's sweeping executive order barring refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim nations amounts to a ban on Muslims."I’ll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,'" Giuliani said on Fox News."He called me up, he said, ‘Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’"ADVERTISEMENTGiuliani said he then put together a commission that included lawmakers and expert lawyers."And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger," Giuliani said."The areas of the world that create danger for us, which is a factual basis, not a religious basis. Perfectly legal, perfectly sensible."Giuliani reiterated that the ban is "not based on religion.""It's based on places where there are substantial evidence that people are sending terrorists into our country," he said.

Despite an international uproar and condemnation by President Obama and nearly all of those running for the presidency, Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims coming to the United States has the support of a sizable majority of Republicans – and a plurality of all voters. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 66% of Likely Republican Voters favor a temporary ban on all Muslims entering the United States until the federal government improves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. Just 24% oppose the plan, with 10% undecided. Among all voters, 46% favor a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States, while 40% are opposed. Fourteen percent (14%) are undecided. (To see survey question wording, click here.)

Trump, the front-runner in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, proposed the ban following last week’s massacre in San Bernardino, California. Sixty-five percent (65%) of voters believe the two shooters in the incident were radical Islamic terrorists. Those individuals had entered the United States without problem and escaped detection despite several actions here suggesting that they had violent intentions. Fifty-nine percent (59%) of voters believe it is too easy for foreigners to legally enter the Untied States. Only 10% believe it is too hard, while 23% say the level of difficulty is about right. Still, when thinking about immigration policy in general, 59% also feel that the United States should treat all potential immigrants equally, down only slightly from June. Thirty percent (30%) think the United States should allow more immigrants from some countries than others, a finding that’s changed very from past surveying.  Eleven percent (11%) are not sure. Late last month – and prior to the mass murders in San Bernardino, Trump said he would support government tracking of Muslims living in the United States through a federal database, a plan his fellow GOP rivals said was going too far. But at that time, one-in-three voters - and a slight plurality of Republicans – supported government monitoring of Muslims.

A study released earlier this year revealed the shocking death toll of the United States’s “War on Terror” since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but the true body count could be even higher. Published in March by Physicians for Social Responsibility, the study, conducted by a team that included some Nobel Prize winners, determined that at least 1.3 million people have died as a result of war since Sept.11, 2001, but the real figure might be as high as two million. The study was an attempt to “close the gaps” in existing research, including studies like the Iraq Body Count,” which puts the number of violent deaths in that country at about 219,000 since 2003, based on media reports of the time period. Investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed, writing in April for Middle East Eye, explained some of the ways the previous figures fell short, according to the physicians’ research: “For instance, although 40,000 corpses had been buried in Najaf since the launch of the war, IBC [Iraq Body Count] recorded only 1,354 deaths in Najaf for the same period. That example shows how wide the gap is between IBC’s Najaf figure and the actual death toll – in this case, by a factor of over 30.

Such gaps are replete throughout IBC’s database. In another instance, IBC recorded just three airstrikes in a period in 2005, when the number of air attacks had in fact increased from 25 to 120 that year. Again, the gap here is by a factor of 40.” The physicians behind the study also praised a controversial report from the medical journal The Lancet that placed the toll count far higher than that of Iraq Body Count, at closer to one million dead. In addition to the war in Iraq, the PSR study added additional victims from other countries where the United States has waged war: “To this, the PSR study adds at least 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, killed as the direct or indirect consequence of US-led war: a ‘conservative’ total of 1.3 million. The real figure could easily be ‘in excess of 2 million’.” These figures may still be underestimating the real death toll, according to Ahmed. These studies only account for the victims of violent conflict, but not the many more who will die as a result of the damage war brings to crucial infrastructure, from roads to farms to hospitals — not to mention devastating sanctions like those placed on Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991. He continues:

“Undisputed UN figures show that 1.7 million Iraqi civilians died due to the West’s brutal sanctions regime, half of whom were children. The mass death was seemingly intended. Among items banned by the UN sanctions were chemicals and equipment essential for Iraq’s national water treatment system. A secret US Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) document discovered by Professor Thomas Nagy of the School of Business at George Washington University amounted, he said, to ‘an early blueprint for genocide against the people of Iraq.’” Similar figures for Afghanistan, he reports, could bring totals to four million or more. As Ahmed points out in his article, the majority of those killed in these wars and those suffering most from these wars, statistically speaking, were Muslim — a stark contrast to the common view that radical Muslim terrorists are the deadliest group in the Middle East. Rather, it would seem the American military are the worst killers, and the death toll resembles religious genocide. In 2009, Stephen M. Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard, wrote in Foreign Policy:

On Wednesday a federal judge indefinitely extended a previously temporary restraining order against U.S. President Donald Trump’s so-called Muslim Ban executive order. U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson turned his earlier temporary restraining order into a preliminary injunction as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Trump’s executive order banning immigration from six majority-Muslim countries. The state of Hawaii launched the lawsuit claiming Trump’s revised executive order, issued March 6, perpetuates the same unconstitutional religious discrimination as the original executive order, which was overturned by a federal judge in January.

“The court will not crawl into a corner, pull the shutters closed, and pretend it has not seen what it has,” Watson wrote on Wednesday. While Trump’s lawyers claim the executive order does not discriminate based on religion, previous courts ruled against the order noting the president and his surrogates’ repeated public promises to impose “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Watson noted that his initial decision to grant the preliminary injunction was based on the likelihood that Hawaii would succeed in proving the revised executive order violated the U.S. Constitution’s provisions protecting religious freedom.

Donald Trump has said he will “postpone” a trip to Israel and a meeting with the country’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, until “after I become president of the US”.

Netanyahu had on Wednesday confirmed he would meet the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination to succeed Barack Obama in the White House despite an international outcry over his suggestion that Muslims should be banned from entering the US. Several hours after confirming the meeting, Netanyahu’s office tweeted that the prime minister rejected Trump’s comments about Muslims but had agreed to meet any US presidential candidate who visited Israel.

Trump’s visit had been opposed by dozens of Israeli MPs – both Jews and Arabs – after his remarks drew condemnation across the Israeli political spectrum. The cancellation also followed reports in the Israeli media that Trump had requested a visit to the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount religious site, revered by Muslims and Jews alike, and home to the al-Aqsa mosque – one of the most important sites in Islam. Some 37 Israeli MPs had signed a letter asking that Trump not be allowed to visit in light of his remarks. The letter, drafted by MP Michal Rozin, and mainly signed by opposition lawmakers, said that, “while leaders around the world condemn the Republican presidential candidate’s racist and outrageous remarks, Netanyahu is warmly embracing him” and any meeting would “disgrace Israel’s democratic character and hurt its Muslim citizens”. Equally damaging for Trump was the fact that Israel’s rightwing energy minister, Yuval Steinitz, one of Netanyahu’s closest political allies, had weighed in, criticising Trump’s remarks. “I recommend fighting terrorist and extremist Islam, but I would not declare a boycott of, ostracism against, or war on Muslims in general,” Steinitz told Israel’s Army Radio.

A mass shooting at a Quebec City mosque last night left six people dead and eight wounded. The targeted mosque, the Cultural Islamic Center of Quebec, was the same one at which a severed pig’s head was left during Ramadan last June. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the episode a “terrorist attack on Muslims.” Almost immediately, various news outlets and political figures depicted the shooter as Muslim. Right-wing nationalist tabloids in the U.K. instantly linked it to Islamic violence. Fox News claimed that “witnesses said at least one gunman shouted ‘Allahu akbar!’”

White House press secretary Sean Spicer exploited the attack to justify President Trump’s ban on immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries. “It’s a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the president is taking steps to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to our nation’s safety and security,” Spicer said at this afternoon’s briefing when speaking of the Quebec City attack. But these assertions are utterly false. The suspect is neither Moroccan nor Muslim. The Moroccan individual, Mohamed Belkhadir, was actually one of the worshippers at the mosque and called 911 to summon the police, playing no role whatsoever in the shooting. The actual shooting suspect is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette, a white French Canadian who is, by all appearances, a rabid anti-immigrant nationalist. A leader of a local immigration rights group, François Deschamps, told a local paper he recognized his photo as an anti-immigrant far-right “troll” who has been hostile to the group online.

The mindlessness is unbearable. Amnesty International tells us that we must “fight the Muslim ban” because Trump’s bigotry is wrecking lives. Anthony Dimaggio at CounterPunch says Trump should be impeached because his Islamophobia is a threat to the Constitution. This is not to single out these two as the mindlessness is everywhere among those whose worldview is defined by Identity Politics. One might think that Amnesty International should be fighting against the Bush/Cheney/Obama regime wars that have produced the refugees by killing and displacing millions of Muslims. For example, the ongoing war that Obama inflicted on Yemen results in the death of one Yemeni child every 10 minutes, according to UNICEF. Where is Amnesty International? Clearly America’s wars on Muslims wreck far more lives than Trump’s ban on immigrants. Why the focus on an immigration ban and not on wars that produce refugees? Is it because Obama is responsible for war and Trump for the ban? Is the liberal/progressive/left projecting Obama’s monstrous crimes onto Trump? Is it that we must hate Trump and not Obama?

As reported by the Washington Post, yesterday President Trump signed an Executive Order ( full text) suspending for 90 days immigrant and non-immigrant entry into the U.S. of aliens from seven Muslim-majority countries-- Iraq, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia. (It should be noted that the countries to which the Executive Order is applicable is discoverable only by elaborate cross references in Sec. 3(c) of the Order that ultimately lead to this list developed last year by the Department of Homeland Security under the Visa Waiver Program Improvement and Terrorist Travel Prevention Act of travelers not eligible to participate in the visa waiver program). The Executive Order does not apply to those entering under various diplomatic visas. The Executive Order also suspends admission of all refugees for 120 days, and of Syrian refugees for an indefinite period. It provides that when refugee admissions are resumed: 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. Following up on this provision, Trump told the Christian Broadcasting Network that priority will be given to persecuted Christians in the Middle East, particularly Syria. The Legal Director of the ACLU in a post earlier today argued that the Executive Order's targeting of Muslims and favoring of Christians violates the Establishment Clause. Meanwhile CAIR announced that it will be holding a news conference Monday on a lawsuit that it will file in federal district court in Virginia to "challenge the constitutionality of the order because its apparent purpose and underlying motive is to ban people of the Islamic faith from Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States."

resident Trump is expected to sign orders Friday to temporarily freeze immigration from seven Muslim nations and halt refugee resettlements from everywhere — a classic example of a solution in search of problem, and just the kind of symbolic act that gives weight to radical Islamists when they argue that the U.S. is an enemy of their faith. Trump’s campaign for president was built on a foundation of fear and resentment, and that dark cloud hangs over these putative attempts to bolster national security. Based on a draft version of the executive order, it seems that Trump will impose a 30-day suspension of visas for people from seven predominately Muslim countries — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — while the government reviews and presumably tightens its visa-vetting protocols. He also will direct security officials to determine within 30 days what information they need to evaluate potential visitors, and list the countries around the world that don’t provide it. Countries that don’t correct the error of their ways within 60 days of that report — including the seven affected by the ban — will have their citizens barred until they comply. Worse, Trump apparently plans to suspend U.S. acceptance of all refugees — people fleeing war or oppression for whom returning home is not an option — for 120 days as the government reviews and revises its screening procedures, and he is expected to slash the number of refugees the U.S. would accept through October 2017 from 110,000 (set by President Obama last September) to 50,000. Trump also will prioritize the resettlement of refugees seeking asylum on grounds of religious persecution, officially valuing people oppressed because of their religion over those targeted for political dissent, sexual orientation or other reasons. 

And Trump wants plans drawn for “safe areas” for Syrians within Syria or nearby nations, which could help the administration at a later point if it wants to institute a longer-term ban on Syrian refugees. But the draft order offers no details on how the safe zones would be secured, or the legal basis for the U.S. establishing control of territory in a sovereign (if war-torn) state.  Such efforts to restrict access to the U.S. by people fleeing war-torn parts of the world would be misguided and inhumane. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, reported in 2015 that in the 14 years after the 9/11 terror attacks, 784,000 refugees resettled in the U.S. Yet during that time only three resettled refugees were convicted on terror-related charges — two of them for plotting against an overseas target and the third for hatching “plans that were barely credible,” according to the report. The vast majority of refugees allowed into the U.S. are first vetted by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, whose screeners then recommend placements in third countries. When the U.S. gets a referral, it conducts its own security screening before offering resettlement, a process that routinely takes one to two years.

What’s more, a study by the New America Foundation shows that 80% of the terrorist attacks in this country since 9/11 have been carried out by American citizens (although some of those perpetrators were naturalized citizens). It is not surprising that some Americans are worried by the hostility directed at them from a small, radicalized segment of the Islamic world. But such fears should not be channeled into a broad, discriminatory retrenchment that is at odds with the best of our humanitarian principles — especially if that retrenchment would likely do little to protect us. The U.S. became a wealthy world power in large part through immigration. And it’s openness has provided a lifeline to the oppressed of the world — the U.S. has formally resettled more refugees than any other country (though at the moment it is not bearing its fair share of the burden of resettling the tens of millions of migrants currently fleeing war zones). Trump’s actions are not only inhumane, they are a betrayal of what the United States stands for. 

A federal judge in Los Angeles has ordered the U.S. government to allow people holding immigrant visas from seven majority-Muslim nations into the United States despite President Trump's executive order banning them.In a temporary restraining order issued late Tuesday, Judge Andre Birotte Jr. ordered the government not to cancel any validly obtained immigrant visas or bar anyone from the seven nations holding them from entering the U.S.But it was unclear whether the order will have any effect. The State Department ordered all visas from the seven countries revoked on Friday, and the government has maintained that orders similar to Birotte's do not apply because the visas are no longer valid.The State Department declined comment Wednesday on Birotte's order, saying it does not comment on pending litigation.

Gartland said two major airlines have turned them down but they are trying to work with smaller airlines that will follow Birotte's order."These are all children, parents and the spouses of U.S. citizens," Goldberg told The Associated Press from the Horn of Africa nation, emphasizing that those stranded are not refugees, though Yemen is engulfed in civil war. They received visas last week, she said.

A petition calling for Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump to be barred from entering the UK has gathered more than 370,000 names, so MPs will have to consider debating it.The petition went on Parliament's e-petition website on Tuesday. It was posted in response to Mr Trump's call for a temporary halt on Muslims entering the United States. Chancellor George Osborne criticised Mr Trump's comments but rejected calls for him to be banned from the UK.A counter-petition, set up on Wednesday, saying Mr Trump should not be banned as it would be "totally illogical" has attracted more than 9,000 signatures. Any petition with more than 100,000 signatures is automatically considered for debate in Parliament.

In other developments: Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has stripped Mr Trump of his status as a business ambassador for Scotland. Aberdeen's Robert Gordon University has revoked Mr Trump's honorary degree, which he received in 2010 in recognition of his achievements as an entrepreneur and businessman. One of the Middle East's largest retail chains, Lifestyle, has withdrawn Donald Trump products from its shelves following his comments.

A federal appeals panel on Thursday unanimously rejected President Trump’s bid to reinstate his ban on travel into the United States from seven largely Muslim nations, a sweeping rebuke of the administration’s claim that the courts have no role as a check on the president.The three-judge panel, suggesting that the ban did not advance national security, said the administration had shown “no evidence” that anyone from the seven nations — Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — had committed terrorist acts in the United States.The ruling also rejected Mr. Trump’s claim that courts are powerless to review a president’s national security assessments. Judges have a crucial role to play in a constitutional democracy, the court said.“It is beyond question,” the decision said, “that the federal judiciary retains the authority to adjudicate constitutional challenges to executive action.”

The decision was handed down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco. It upheld a ruling last Friday by a federal district judge, James L. Robart, who blocked key parts of the travel ban, allowing thousands of foreigners to enter the country.

“Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” reads UN General Assembly Resolution 3379. The measure was adopted 40 years ago, on Nov. 10, 1975, and the majority of the international community backed it. 72 countries voted for the resolution, with just 35 opposed (and 32 abstentions). Although little-known in the US today (it is remarkable how effectively the US and its allies have rewritten history in their favor), UN GA Res. 3379, titled “Elimination of all forms of racial discrimination,” made an indelible imprint on history. The geographic distribution of the vote was telling. The countries that voted against the resolution were primarily colonial powers and/or their allies. The countries that voted for it were overwhelmingly formerly colonized and anti-imperialist nations.

The resolution also cited two other little-known measures passed by international organizations in the same year: the Assembly of the Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity’s resolution 77, which ruled “that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure”; and the Political Declaration and Strategy to Strengthen International Peace and Security and to Intensify Solidarity and Mutual Assistance among Non-Aligned Countries, which called Zionism a “racist and imperialist ideology.” When the resolution was passed, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Chaim Herzog — who later became Israel’s sixth president, and the father of Isaac Herzog, the head of Israel’s opposition — famously tore up the text at the podium. Herzog claimed the measure was “based on hatred, falsehood, and arrogance,” insisting it was “devoid of any moral or legal value.” Still today, supporters of Israel argue UN GA Res. 3379 was an anomalous product of anti-Semitism. In reality, however, the resolution was the result of international condemnation of the illegal military occupation to which Palestinians had been subjected since 1967 and the apartheid-like conditions the indigenous Arab population had lived under as second-class citizens of an ethnocratic state since 1948.

In 1991, resolution 3379 was repealed for two primary reasons: One, the Soviet bloc, which helped pass the resolution, had collapsed; and two, Israel and the US demanded that it be revoked or they refused to participate in the Madrid Peace Conference. At the UN on Nov. 11, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power and Secretary of State John Kerry eulogized the late Herzog and forcefully condemned the resolution on its 40th anniversary. In his 2,500-word statement, Kerry mentioned Palestinians just once, and only then as an extension of Israelis. In her remarks, Power did not mention Palestinians at all.

President Trump signed an executive order on Friday that purports to bar for at least 90 days almost all permanent immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries, including Syria and Iraq, and asserts the power to extend the ban indefinitely.But the order is illegal. More than 50 years ago, Congress outlawed such discrimination against immigrants based on national origin.

President Trump could issue additional executive orders expanding the list of Muslim-majority countries whose people are banned from emigrating to the United States, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said Sunday.Future White House executive orders could include countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Egypt being added to the list of banned countries, Mr. Priebus said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order freezing the United States’ refugee resettlement program, barring Syrian refugees indefinitely and temporarily restricting immigration from unnamed countries is already resulting in families being stopped at airports. But the order is also notable for its exclusion of a provision, which appeared in an earlier draft of the order, that would have created a process for establishing so-called safe zones in Syria. That clause would have instructed the secretary of defense to draft a plan within 90 days to create “safe zones to protect vulnerable Syrian populations,” according to a copy of the draft published by The Huffington Post on Wednesday. The decision to omit the safe zones proposal allows the Trump administration to avoid, at least temporarily, the complex questions that such a policy would raise. Creating and protecting safe zones could increase American military intervention in Syria, and pose a number of political and logistical problems regarding its implementation.

Both Republican and Democratic officials have at times advocated for implementing safe zones in Syria. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made safe zones part of her foreign policy platform during her 2016 presidential campaign, and prominent GOP figures like Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and John McCain (Ariz.) have all advocated for the policy. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also supported potential safe zones along the Turkey-Syria border, and has discussed the idea of havens for displaced Yazidis in northern Iraq. Turkey has previously backed the policy as well, and already controls a strip of land in Syria along its border that has become something of a de facto safe zone for internally displaced people.

Many politicians advocate safe zones as a middle ground between large-scale military intervention and inaction, while claiming they will mitigate the flow of refugees into other states. But experts say safe zones require large amounts of resources, military personnel and money to implement. Safe zones can also have unintended consequences that endanger the civilians they aim to protect.

Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama’s closest confidants.  Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama’s head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs.”  In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems “false conspiracy theories” about the Government.  This would be designed to increase citizens’ faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists.  The paper’s abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here. Sunstein advocates that the Government’s stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups.”  He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called “independent” credible voices to bolster the Government’s messaging (on the ground that those who don’t believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government).   This program would target those advocating false “conspiracy theories,” which they define to mean: “an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role.”  Sunstein’s 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story‘s Daniel Tencer.

There’s no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein’s position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked.  Regardless, Sunstein’s closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote.  This isn’t an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein’s close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees.  Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class.  All of that makes Sunstein’s paper worth examining in greater detail.

Initially, note how similar Sunstein’s proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates.  The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as “independent analysts” in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon.  Bush officials secretly paid supposedly “independent” voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts.  In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens.  In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda — and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda.  Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government ”propaganda” within the U.S., aimed at American citizens: As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, “publicity or propaganda” is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) “covert propaganda.”  By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.