Washington: The Bush and Obama administrations went to great lengths to embrace Muslims as the Middle East imploded. And despite Donald Trump's campaign rants, that consensus held – prominent Republicans, like then Indiana governor Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan were quick to rebuke Trump when he proposed a Muslim ban.
Here's a Pence tweet from December 2015: "Calls to ban Muslims from entering the US are offensive and unconstitutional".
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New York Senator Chuck Schumer was brought to tears as he demanded that President Trump reverse his immigration order, calling the ban 'mean-spirited'.
Here's Ryan from the same news cycle: "Freedom of religion is a fundamental constitutional principle. It's a founding principle of this country. This is not conservatism. What was proposed yesterday is not what this party stands for. And more importantly, it's not what this country stands for".
And a few months later, then retired Marine Corps General James Mattis said that Trump's proposal was causing American allies to believe "we have lost faith in reason." He told Politico: "They think we've completely lost it. It's sending shock waves through this international system."
These were strong words – presumably all three believed what they said back then.
But now Trump is president. Pence is vice president; after Pence, Ryan is next in the presidential line of succession; and Mattis is Trump's defence secretary. And while Pence and Ryan are now publicly supporting Trump's controversial migrant and refugee crackdown, Mattis stays mum.
This is the Trump that Americans, and the world, were always going to get. The surprise in the campaign was that, under attack from the likes of the trio above, Candidate Trump did hedge, saying his proposed ban would target countries, not a religion.
But Trump always wanted a religion test – and he's got it.
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It's in his rhetoric on the plight of Christians in the Middle East and it's in his executive order, which states that despite a 120-day suspension on entry by refugees, most of whom are Muslims, those whose religion is a minority in their homelands, most of who would be Christian, were to be admitted on a "case by case" basis.
The challenge for Trump in attempting to dress up his religion test as a national security measure is that the country knows what he really thinks from his unfiltered campaign rhetoric and from that of some in his team. Remember this February 2016 tweet, now deleted, by his national security adviser Michael Flynn: "Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions…"
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But some American Christian leaders don't buy it. Through the weekend, spokesmen for the evangelical, Roman Catholic and mainline Protestant churches most active in helping persecuted Christians criticised the order as discriminatory, misguided and inhumane.
"We believe in assisting all, regardless of their religious beliefs," said Bishop Joe Vasquez, chairman of the committee on migration for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.
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Jen Smyers, the director of policy and advocacy for the immigration and refugee program of Church World Service, which represents dozens of Christian denominations, declared Friday a "shameful day" in America's history.
Church groups also rejected Trump's claim that the Obama administration discriminated against Syrian Christian refugees who make up about one per cent of last year's refugee intake despite an estimated five per cent of Syrians being Christian.
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One explanation for the disparity, they told The New York Times, was that vetting interviews took 18 months to three years and that many Syrian Christians got into the pipeline more recently.
"We have no evidence that would support a belief that the Obama administration was discriminating against Christian populations," Reverend Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief, the humanitarian arm of National Association of Evangelicals, said.
Explaining that a network of 1200 evangelical churches, had helped it to resettle thousands of Muslim refugees, Arbeiter said World Relief was opposed to "any measure that would discriminate against the most vulnerable people in the world based on ethnicity, country of origin, religion, gender or gender identity.
"Our commitment is to serve vulnerable people without regard to those factors, or any others."
But was for reasons of national security that most critics, including prominent Republicans, challenged the soundness of the Trump edict – raising questions of the extent to which Trump sought advice beyond the echo chamber of his own team.
The thrust of the national security critique is that Trump is playing into the hands of extremists, because his executive order supports their claim that a "recklessly belligerent" Washington is at war with Islam and that they'll be more determined to strike US targets, hoping to provoke an overreaction from Trump; at the same time, US allies in the Middle East will be less willing to cooperate with an administration that vilifies their faith; and in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, locals who provide vital assistance to US forces will be less willing after hearing Trump slam the door on any hopes they have of ever resettling in the US.
Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, a Republican and a frequently Trump critic, argued: "Enhancing long term national security requires that we have a clear-eyed view of radical Islamic terrorism without ascribing radical Islamic terrorist views to all Muslims."
Condemning Trump, Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham said in a joint statement:
"We are particularly concerned by reports that this order went into effect with little to no consultation with the Departments of State, Defence, Justice, and Homeland Security.
"Such a hasty process risks harmful results. We should not stop those who have served as interpreters for our military and diplomats from seeking refuge in the country they risked their lives to help. And we should not turn our backs on those refugees who have been shown through extensive vetting to pose no demonstrable threat to our nation, and who have suffered unspeakable horrors, most of them women and children.
"Ultimately, we fear this executive order will become a self-inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism. Our most important allies in the fight against ISIL are the vast majority of Muslims who reject its apocalyptic ideology of hatred. This executive order sends a signal, intended or not, that America does not want Muslims coming into our country. That is why we fear this executive order may do more to help terrorist recruitment than improve our security."
Experts agreed. Describing Trump's executive order as a huge mistake in terms of counter-terrorism cooperation," Daniel Benjamin, a formerly a senior counter-terrorism official at the State Department, said: "For the life of me, I don't see why we would want to alienate the Iraqis when they are the ground force against ISIS".
And noting that the jihadist threat in the US was "largely homegrown", he warned that the order would encourage the resentments and anxieties that in rare cases fuelled American Muslim support for ISIS.
"It sends an unmistakable message to the American Muslim community that they are facing discrimination and isolation," he said.
Amidst head-scratching at the apparent exclusion of the Pentagon from consultation before the executive order was issued, Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, told reporters: "After all the money and lives spent in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon knows better than anyone that terrorism is a problem of a small number of enemies embedded in a population of people you need to win over. I don't see the part of this that's meant to win over anyone."
Vali Nasr, dean of the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, agreed - "It's very difficult for people to cooperate with the United States military when they feel humiliated by the US. The Iraqi situation is the most grievous - we are fighting a war with the Iraqis, against ISIS. How can we fight with them when the message from the White House is discriminatory?"
In a Sunday editorial, The New York Times didn't do a roll call of the figures whose criticism might have stayed the hand of George W. Bush as he girded for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 – people like then secretary of state Colin Powell and then British prime minister Tony Blair.
But its message to Mattis in particular was clear.
"His silence now is alarming to all who admire his commitment to American security. Mr Mattis and other senior government officials who know better cannot lend their names to this travesty.
"Doing so would do more than tarnish their professional reputations. It would make them complicit in abdicating American values and endangering their fellow citizens."
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