Since 2003, about 10,000 Muslim high students from more than 40 countries have participated in the Kennedy Luger YES exchange program. They came to America to help build bridges between their culture and ours. Now, in tragic fashion, President Donald Trump seems intent on undermining all the work they and their supporting host communities have done. We can’t let that happen.
Trump’s latest salvo against Muslims came two weeks ago when he signed an executive order barring people from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the United States for 90 days. It also indefinitely blocked all Syrian refugees from coming here.
“To be clear, this is not a Muslim ban,” Trump said the next day. “This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe.”
As countless commentators have pointed out, no one from those seven countries has killed an American in terrorist attacks here.
A Somalian refugee did injure 13 people at Ohio State University last year. And to “avenge the deaths of Muslims worldwide” an Iranian-born man, who lived in the U.S. since the age of 2, injured nine people when he drove an SUV into a crowd at the University of North Carolina in 2006.
Those are two of only 10 radical Islamist inspired terrorist attacks in America that have occurred since Sept. 11, 2001. There’s been more mass shootings than that by non-Muslims since Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.
So his executive order isn’t about protecting Americans from anything. It’s fulfillment of a campaign promise that was usually accompanied by incendiary rhetoric against Muslims everywhere.
Trump equates his distaste for political correctness with license to apply degrading stereotypes to anyone he chooses. It started with his claim that most Mexicans coming across the border were criminals. And it continues every time he calls the news media “the most dishonest people in the world.”
It’s the same kind of shallow, political opportunism that Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei used when responding to the ban. In front of an audience of Iranian military officials he thanked Trump for revealing “the real face of the United States.”
One of the primary objectives of the YES program is to “to break down cultural barriers, misperceptions and stereotypes between Muslim countries and the United States.” The goal here isn’t just for Americans to see Muslims as individual people who share with us many common experiences and dreams. After living with an American family and attending a public high school for 10 months, YES students return to their country with a vivid appreciation for diversity and tolerance of all people. That helps their families, friends and possibly beyond trust that America isn’t a monolithic society intent on remaking the world as Khamenei claims.
Over the past six years I’ve had the privilege of mentoring 20 YES students in Juneau. As high achieving students, it’s in their nature to keep up with the news in their countries and around the world. They already knew about the inflammatory remarks Trump made throughout his campaign. This week I contacted them to get their reaction to his executive order.
“A Trump state that decides to ban Muslims for security and terrorism reasons only speaks of Trump and his supporters, but not all Americans” Nadeen Alshaer told me. The young Palestinian woman, who will soon receive a degree in journalism, said from her first day here she developed a new perspective on Americans and our government. “It sounds cliché,” she wrote, “but not all people are the same.”
That’s the same lesson Veysel Kazanci learned when he arrived here from Turkey in August 2015. The students he met didn’t “really care what country I was from and it fascinated me how easy it was to be one of you,” he wrote. “How great it was to break the ice between our cultures. How welcoming Juneau was as a community. I beg you the people of U.S. … Please don’t let one person to build a thick wall between cultures.”
Our freedom to resist terrible laws like this is something people from these countries don’t have. They admire it, but as Maha Abdulrazzaq from Yemen points out, only if we use it. “Lots of Yemenis are respecting Americans more than before because of the people who stood up against Trump’s decision for Muslims,” she wrote.
These students found appreciation for diversity and tolerance after living in America for a year. They learned it’s a necessity in a culture that believes in freedom and justice for all. If we want to keep it that way, it’s imperative to unite ourselves in resistance to every discriminatory law our government imposes.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
