And of course it's discriminatory! That's sort of, like, the whole point. All the existing immigration policies are discriminatory. That's why I (Canadian) can go basically anywhere, but someone from Central America can't.
So Trump campaigned on a promise to ban Muslims from entering the US. He then instituted a blanket ban on entry from 7 overwhelmingly Muslim countries. Are we splitting hairs again implying that these two things are a coincidence because the wording of the EO happened to avoid a blatantly unconstitutional formulation?
It seems pretty ineffective to ban people from 7 nations, and ignore the nations where the vast majority of Muslims actually live and do business.
Do people really think Somalia is some kind of Isamic power-player versus Saudi Arabia or the Emirates?
These countries were not picked randomly because they "Muslim". There is a long standing animosity against them. A retired US general in 2007 said: “We’re going to take out 7 countries in 5 years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan & Iran...”[1].
And now which countries are banned: Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen... that's 6 out of the 7 named above.
Now please do not read this as a defence of the executive order. Whatever its intentions, it was poorly implemented and applied with seemingly no thought to the political fallout or the disruption to peoples' lives. Green card holders in America deserve better than no-notice before being detained at the borders.
However, it seems to me that every one of the countries named is currently embroiled in a civil war or has strong non-governmental forces within its borders----that is the commonality that they share.
When '(surprise!)' is written in brackets like that, or otherwise thrown in as an interjection, it is almost always intended sarcastically. This is a very common written English idiom (at least online).
You can stop being a muslim, you can stop being a christian (I know, I did) and you can stop being a socialist. You can't stop being whatever ethnicity you were when you were born.
Thus this is actually a worse order than a straight out ban on muslims from these countries would be.
You can stop being male. Is it ok to ban you from the country? It's acceptable to ban ideas and religion from countries? Holy shit what happened to America..
Indeed."Muslim" is not a race. Perhaps a better word would be "bigoted" or "discriminatory" not "racist"?
If we are going to be splitting hairs: are Persians a race, or are they an ethnicity?