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US president promoting Islamophobia, racism: Journalist

US President Donald Trump leaves in his limousine after the annual Friends of Ireland luncheon at the Capitol March 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by AFP)

The White House has announced it will appeal against the rulings of two federal judges who blocked President Donald Trump’s second executive order about travel ban on citizens of Muslim-majority countries. Two federal judges in Hawaii and Maryland froze Trump’s order to close US borders to nationals from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Press TV has asked Sander Hicks, an investigative journalist, and Peter Sinnott, an independent scholar, both from New York about the argument on the ban in the United States.

Hicks said that the new US president showed his racist and anti-Islam nature during the 2016 presidential race.

“Trump was Islamophobic and his targeting of Muslims is now a part of this legal complaint,” the analyst said on Thursday night.

He said several judges and pro-migrant activists are going to file a lawsuit against the US president’s travel ban. 

“Everything that happened in the past year with the campaign and all the clear Islamophobia is now in a legal document,” he added.

Referring to the background of the Trump family in promoting racism, he said, “Fred Trump, Donald Trump’s father, was arrested in 1927 at a Ku Klux Klan riot.”

“The Department of Justice in 1973 prosecuted Donald Trump and Fred Trump for racist discriminatory practices; so, Trump’s scapegoating of Islam is the oldest trick in the book,” Hicks noted.

He went on to say that the courts are stopping Trump from his Islamophobic, racist and discriminatory ban on any immigrants or any refugees from the top six countries.

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The immigration problem that the US and other Western states are facing are the consequences of former American president George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and goes back to the 9/11 terrorist attack and its cover-up by Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney, he argued.

According to the commentator, the United States’ so-called war on terror is in fact “a war for US oil” and “a war for US global strategic interests.”

Sinnott said Trump’s executive order is not a travel ban against Muslims. Pointing to judicial attempts to block Trump’s order, he said the setback is merely political.

The US Supreme Court, he said, will uphold the order "based on its wording, because the wording does not discriminate against Muslims.”

This file photo taken on November 15, 2016 shows the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. (Photo by AFP)

He touched on Yemen, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Syria as the countries which have difficulties with war and terrorism and cannot vet immigrants.

Iran is a different case in the travel ban list and it could be negotiated to solve long-term problems between Washington and Tehran, he said.

“Unlike any of the others on the list, Iran has the opportunity to change the parameters, because it’s not a country in civil war or incredible turmoil.”

Referring to the exemption of Saudi Arabia from the travel ban list, he said, “It is the center of a philosophy that has been attacking the United States” and “it is one of the main exporters of a philosophy and of a people that in the end are involved in terrorism.”


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