Travel Ban Would Not Have Stopped Previous Attacks

The claim by the Trump administration that the travel ban from these countries would make the US safer and would have prevented previous attacks is quite hollow. The Washington Post has an article that basically said that the current policy would not have stopped those attacks, because the attackers were either US citizens, permanent residents, or were not from one of those banned countries.

This is a table that summarizes the attacks by so-called Islamic extremists since 2001.

“The ban is less about national security and more about advancing a worldview based on religious and racial exclusion,” J.M. Berger, a fellow with the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism at The Hague and co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror,” wrote in an email Sunday. “It’s not likely to make us safer, and it is far more likely to help our real enemies, ISIS and al-Qaeda. We don’t do ourselves any favors when we make their talking points into reality.”

So instead of making us safer, it has made us even more vulnerable.

Zz.

Happy Birthday, Fred Korematsu

Today, January 30, 2017, Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of activist Fred Korematsu, who fought the US government way back in 1942 on the internment of Japanese US citizens during World War II.

Korematsu refused to comply with the order and fled from his home in San Leandro, California to Oakland. Korematsu was soon captured and convicted, but he appealed the decision. Although the Supreme Court ruled against him 6-3, the decision was overturned in 1983.

In the original Supreme Court ruling, dissenting Justice Robert Jackson said that the only crime Korematsu committed was “being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born and where all his life he has lived.” Justice Frank Murphy called the executive order “legalization of racism.”

“It is the case of convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry, and solely because of his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States,” they wrote. “If this be a correct statement of the facts disclosed by this record, and facts of which we take judicial notice, I need hardly labor the conclusion that Constitutional rights have been violated.”

And now, more than 70 years later, history is almost repeating itself, where whole groups of people are being persecuted not because they did anything wrong, but because they are assumed to already be guilty just simply for who they are.

Zz.

I Started A Food Blog

Yeah, I did! I decided that all the stuff about food that I would have posted in here belongs in a separate blog than this.

http://epicuriousitykillstheschrodingercat.blogspot.com/

So no more food stuff in here! :)

Zz.