World must call Trump out

Jay Kuten

AT A CONCERT in London in March 2003, as the Bush Administration prepared to invade Iraq in what would prove to be America's greatest strategic blunder up to that time, Natalie Maines of the band The Dixie Chicks declared to cheers of the crowd: "We're ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas".

George W Bush supporters reacted with venom, urging a boycott of the Texas trio.

Now, in view of the immoral and illegal orders President Donald Trump has signed, banning Muslims -- and, in particular, Syrian refugees -- from entry to the United States, I am ashamed that the current president is from our planet.

In a flurry of activity, Trump has signed a number of directives.

In less than a week since his inauguration, he has ordered several federal agencies to cease communicating with the public; he has threatened China over its claims to the South China Sea; and he has ordered the Homeland Security Department (a name redolent of past dark associations) to report weekly crimes of immigrants -- a tactic once used by the Nazis to paint a picture of Jews as criminals, hence unworthy of any sympathy or support by their neighbours.

The propagandist behind that order and campaign, Julius Streicher, was hanged at Nuremberg in 1946.

Trump has also ordered the construction of a wall between the US and Mexico insisting, over Mexico's objections, that that country will pay for it.

As people who have observed Trump at close range over time -- his ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal, for example -- have said, his attention span is measurable in seconds when the subject is anything but himself (see http://tinyurl.com/hsw8tyw).

That trait lends weight to the several reports in the New York Times and elsewhere crediting these directives to the work of Steve Bannon, a senior adviser. Bannon had been the editor of Breitbart News, a far-right news website sympathetic to white supremacists, misogynists and racists. The site was several times successfully sued for publishing libellous material found to be fake.

In a televised interview, Trump has denied that his exclusion order is aimed at Muslims, and he has also claimed that under President Barack Obama Muslim refugees were given priority over Christian refugee applicants. Those are two of Trump's alternative facts (that is, lies) in support of his stated intention to give priority to Christians in admission to the country.

According to the US Office of Refugee Resettlement of the US Health and Human Services Department report for 2015, 38,901 Muslim refugees were admitted along with 37,521 Christian refugees that year. This from predominantly Muslim countries with less than 5 per cent Christian populations.

The ban on Muslim refugee immigrants is bad enough. The serious legal flaw in Trump/Bannon's exclusionary directive is that it violates the US Constitution.

In addition to excluding people from several Muslim countries, the order explicitly favours the immigration of members of "minority religions persecuted" in those countries -- in other words, Christians.

That violates what is called the Establishment Clause of the US Constitution. It is the bedrock clause prohibiting favouritism of any religion, thereby prohibiting discrimination against anyone on the basis of religion.

With a stroke of a pen in the hand of Donald Trump but guided by white supremacist Steve Bannon, the Administration is seeking to overturn that foundation of US democracy and the 225 years of jurisprudence that has safeguarded that set of principles.

The moral flaw is highlighted by Trump's signing his infamous order on January 27, 2017, the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, now memorialised as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

If we learned anything from that horror, it is that to stand by and do nothing is morally unacceptable. Thou shalt not be a perpetrator. Thou shalt not be a bystander. People of goodwill everywhere, including in New Zealand, must stand with Muslims and urge their governments to condemn these actions of Trump.

�Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable.