Over the past week, Americans experienced a breathtaking barrage from top politicians and news commentators about “who we are” or “what we as a country stand for.” Using the phrase identifies the speaker as one of the virtuous “we” who shuns Donald Trump and rejects his recommendation, post San Bernardino terror attacks, that Muslim immigration to the United States be halted until the government can “figure out what is going on.”
The breadth and scope of reaction against Trump’s comment was stunning. Politicians from House speaker Paul Ryan to Hillary Clinton, the major neoconservative columnists at the country’s largest papers, along with every liberal or left wing opinion outlet one could imagine, rushed to express contempt for Trump and his suggestion. What passes for the foreign policy establishment chimed in too. General Wesley Clark labeled Trump’s remarks “un-American”. David Cameron to Benjamin Netanyahu added their own denunciations. An ACLU official recommended that Trump supporters be shot. For several days, America experienced the kind of bipartisan power elite unanimity which one thought could happen only in the wake of national tragedy.
Much of the reaction was somewhat Islamophilic: America needed larger numbers of Muslim immigrants to help win hearts and minds versus ISIS. An immigration pause would alienate them. As evidence, the Times highlighted a story of Trump luxury brand items being removed from the shelves in rich Arab Gulf states.
But no one has yet measured how the prospect of an immigrant visa, or lack of it, weighs compared to other policies through which the United States makes an impression on the Muslim world. For instance, one way in which the U.S states “who we are” to Arab and Muslim audiences is by killing a lot of Muslims. Several years ago Harvard Professor Stephen Walt came up with an estimate of how many Muslims have been killed by the United States in the past 30 years, estimating conservatively that it was slightly less than 300,000.
