Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 1, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Wednesday, February 1, 2017 Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager OUR VIEW World is united against Trump’s Muslim ban It hasn’t even been two weeks since Donald Trump has been president, but it feels like a century. A majority of our readership voted for the man, hoping he could fix a broken political system. But by now it is clear that Trump plans to destroy that system — not fix it — and the great American experiment hangs in the balance. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Trump the president has proven to be the same man as Trump the candidate. At every campaign stop he proposed policies of cruelty and ignorance, and on that he has delivered in spades. Consider recent actions as campaign promises kept. The result has been worldwide chaos, panic and anger — most recently and publicly in response to Trump’s ban on refugees fleeing from some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Trump’s order barring Muslims from those seven nations — and giving refugee priority to Christians — is un-American, unconstitutional and immoral. But it’s not just us saying that. Here are some of the various people who have spoken publicly against the policy. We hope you add your voice to the chorus. “The sickness or, you can say the sin, that Jesus condemns most is hypocrisy, which is precisely what is happening when someone claims to be a Christian but does not live according to the teaching of Christ. You cannot be a Christian without living like a Christian ... You cannot be a Christian without practicing the Beatitudes. You cannot be a Christian without doing what Jesus teaches us in Matthew 25 ... It’s hypocrisy to call yourself a Christian and chase away a refugee or someone seeking help, someone who is hungry or thirsty, toss out someone who is in need of my help.” — Pope Francis “(Trump’s plan) goes against everything we stand for and believe in.” — Former vice president Dick Cheney “In my conversations with officials here in Washington this week, I’ve made it clear that Apple believes deeply in the importance of immigration — both to our company and to our nation’s future. Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we do.” — Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, in a memo to staff “It is an inhumane act against people fleeing war zones.” — Doctors Without Borders “Foreigners from those seven nations have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and the end of 2015.” — Alex Nowrasteh, immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute “Such a hasty process risks harmful results. We fear this executive order will become a self- inflicted wound in the fight against terrorism.” — Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. and Lindsey Graham, R- S.C. “(The executive order is) akin to President Trump taking a wrecking ball to the Statue of Liberty.” — Jen Smyers, Church World Service “It’s a horrible idea and I really I feel for all the people who are affected, families are being torn apart and I worry in the big picture what this means to the security of the world. It’s going about it completely opposite. You want to solve terror, you want to solve crime, this is not the way to do it.” — Steve Kerr, NBA basketball coach “While not explicitly a religious test, it comes close to one which is inconsistent with our American character.” — Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. “Discrimination on nationality alone is forbidden under human rights law. The U.S. ban is also mean-spirited, and wastes resources needed for proper counter- terrorism.” — Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein, United Nations human rights chief “It’s a deep and tragic irony that Donald Trump is slamming the door in the faces of refugees right before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The entire refugee convention came out of the Holocaust and the failure of the international community to protect Jews and survivors.” —Mark Hetfield, president and CEO of HIAS, which was formed in 1881 to help Jews fleeing ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe “Regardless of whether or how you worship, where you come from or who you love, everyone’s individual experience is what makes us stronger as a whole. Those values are being threatened by the recent executive order in the U.S. banning refugees, as well as visitors, from seven Muslim-majority countries. This is a policy we don’t support.” — Mark Parker, Nike CEO “(The executive order is) a clear insult to the Islamic world ... and a great gift to extremists and their supporters.” — Iran Ministry of Foreign Affairs “This 90-day ban ... is unacceptable and I urge the administration to halt enforcement of this order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy can be reinstated.” — Rep. Charlie Dent, R-Penn. “Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize, and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.” — Former President Barack Obama “If we send a signal to the Middle East that the U.S. sees all Muslims as jihadis, the terrorist recruiters win by telling kids that America is banning Muslims and that this is America versus one religion.” — Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb. “We have no evidence that would support a belief that the Obama administration was discriminating against Christian populations. (World Relief is against) 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.” — Rev. Scott Arbeiter, president of World Relief, humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. OTHER VIEWS President Trump, meet my family After imprisonment in a Yugoslav he New York Times has concentration camp, he made it to periodically, to its shame, Italy and then France, but he couldn’t succumbed to the kind of get a work permit, and he thought that xenophobic fearmongering that neither he nor any children he might President Donald Trump is now trying later have would ever be fully accepted to make American policy. in France. In 1875, The Times sternly warned So he dreamed of traveling to that too many Irish and German immigrants (like the Trumps) could Nicholas America, which he had heard would “deprive Americans by birth and Kristof be open to all. He explored a fake marriage to an American woman to descent of the small share they yet Comment get a visa, but that fell through. Finally retain” in New York City. he met an American woman working In 1941, The Times cautioned in Paris who convinced her family back in in a front-page article that European Jews Portland, Oregon, to sponsor him, along with desperately seeking American visas might be their church, the First Presbyterian Church of Nazi spies. In 1942, as Japanese-Americans Portland. were being interned, The Times cheerfully As Krzysztofowicz stood on the deck suggested that the detainees were happily of the ship Marseille, approaching New undertaking an “adventure.” York Harbor in 1952, a We make bad decisions white-haired woman from when we fear immigrants Boston chatted with him we “otherize.” That’s why and quoted the famous lines Americans burned Irish from the Statue of Liberty, Catholics alive, banned “Give me your tired, your Chinese for decades, poor, your huddled masses denied visas to Anne yearning to breathe free Frank’s family and interned ….” Krzysztofowicz spoke Japanese-Americans. And little English and didn’t yes, The New York Times understand, so she wrote sometimes participated in them down for him and such madness. handed him the paper, saying, “Keep it as a But we will not be part of that today. souvenir, young man.” Trump signed an executive order on Then as she was walking away, she Friday that suspends refugee programs and corrected herself: “young American.” targets Muslims from certain countries. It’s Krzysztofowicz kept that scrap of paper hypocritical for Trump to be today’s avatar of and marveled that he — a refugee who had hostility to immigrants, since his own family repeatedly faced death in the Old Country for suffered from anti-German sentiment and not belonging — now somehow counted as pretended to be Swedish. But I’m indignant an American even before he had set foot on for a more personal reason — and I’m getting American soil, even before he had learned to that. English. It was an inclusiveness that dazzled Kirk W. Johnson, a former American aid him, that kindled a love for America that he official in Iraq, fears that the executive order passed on to his son. will bar military interpreters who have bled That strand of hospitality represents the for America and to whom we have promised best of this country. The church sponsored entry. He told me about one interpreter, Krzysztofowicz even though he wasn’t a nicknamed Homeboy, who ran through fire to Presbyterian, even though he was Eastern rescue a wounded American soldier, and then European at a time when the Communist bloc was himself shot. Homeboy survived, barely, posed an existential threat to America. He but lost his leg — and as he recovered, a grenade was thrown at his home by insurgents could have been a spy or a terrorist. But he wasn’t. After arriving in Oregon, angry that he had helped Americans. he decided that the name Krzysztofowicz was After years of vetting, Homeboy was unworkable for Americans, so he shortened it approved for a visa for interpreters who to Kristof. He was my dad. helped the United States. Does Trump really Recently I returned to the First Presbyterian want to betray such people who risked more Church to thank the congregation for taking for America than Trump himself ever did? a risk and sponsoring my father, who died in Yet if fear and obliviousness have led us 2010. And the church, I’m delighted to say, is periodically to target refugees, there’s also moving to support a refugee family this year. another thread that runs through American Mr. President, please remember: This is history. It’s reflected in the welcome received a country built by refugees and immigrants, by somebody I deeply admire: Wladyslaw your ancestors and mine. When we bar them Krzysztofowicz. And this is personal. and vilify them, we shame our own roots. Raised in what was then Romania and is ■ now Ukraine, Krzysztofowicz was jailed by Nicholas Kristof grew up on a sheep and the Gestapo for assisting an anti-Nazi spy for the West. His aunt was murdered in Auschwitz cherry farm in Yamhill. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times since 2001, writes for similar spying, but he was freed with a op-ed columns that appear twice a week. He bribe. When World War II was ending, he won the Pulitzer Prize two times, in 1990 and fled his home as it fell into the hands of the 2006. Soviets. T Fear and obliviousness have led us to periodically target refugees. YOUR VIEWS Illegal aliens are a drain on federal prison systems One of the negative impacts of having a significant foreign national population residing in the United States, be they legally or illegally present in the country, continues to be crime. The scope and impact of foreign national crime on the U.S. citizens and residents of this country continues to go almost unreported by mainstream news sources online, on television or in hard-copy newspapers. Information on foreign national crime is readily available to any mainstream news source that has the ability to do a simple search on the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons inmates statistics website under the heading of inmate citizenship. A search of the bureau website reveals the number and percentage of criminal aliens in federal prisons on Dec. 24, 2016. There were 41,216 criminal alien inmates in the prison system. Alien inmates were 21.8 percent of the federal prison population; more than two in every ten prisoners were criminal aliens. With 27,085 Mexican nationals being incarcerated in the prison system, they were the vast majority of criminal aliens in federal prisons. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons breaks down the federal prison population into 13 types of offenses. One of the top five offenses, the reason inmates were incarcerated in federal prisons, was for immigration crimes. There were 15,073 inmates in the BOP prison system incarcerated for immigration crimes; they were 8.5 percent of the federal prison population. The mainstream media’s ongoing failure to exercise its due diligence in reporting on foreign national crime means that elected and non-elected governmental officials responsible for law enforcement at a national, state and local level will not be held accountable in enforcing laws written to protect U.S. citizens and residents from criminal aliens that have and continue to invade our country. David Olen Cross Salem LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Send letters to 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.