[Ussama Makdisi] Trump order pits Muslims against Christians

President Donald Trump’s unwarranted anti-Muslim ban imposed on refugees, immigrants and visitors from seven mostly impoverished and war-torn countries contained an extraordinary clause exempting Christians from these same countries from its draconian sway.

Trump then doubled-down with a tweet the following day: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”

The cynical executive order is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it plays Muslim against Christian, demonizing the former while pretending to be sympathetic to the latter. Trump’s politics of sectarian sympathy and the purported protection of minorities has a long history. It has led to more persecution, not less.

Since the 19th century, European colonial powers often intervened in the Middle East along sectarian lines. They claimed to have the interests of local Christians and Jews at heart. They thus raised the hopes for salvation from abroad among non-Muslim communities and encouraged them to think of themselves as different from their Muslim compatriots. European powers ignored outrages against Muslims, including those by France, which invaded and colonized Algeria in the nineteenth century and savagely repressed resistance to its rule in the 20th century.

These same powers consistently undermined anti-colonial projects of secular solidarity by actively pitting Jews against Muslims, and Arabs against Jews; Christians against Muslims, and Muslims of different sects against each other.

Several ambitious Middle Eastern Christian leaders and revolutionaries either lobbied for or put their faith in European intervention on their behalf only to realize far too late that European sympathy was little more than empty rhetoric. The great Western powers of the day never seriously cared about the non-Muslims of the Middle East. Their policy interests trumped altruistic concerns. The threat of European interference on their behalf, however, made them increasingly suspect in the eyes of their Muslim compatriots.

The Armenians were famously caught between the increasingly xenophobic Ottoman Turkish nationalism of the early 20th century and the false promise of salvation from abroad: what historian Donald Bloxham has evocatively called the “great game of genocide.” Although American missionaries had clamored for intervention on behalf of the Armenians before, during and after World War I, the US government patched up its relationship with the “Terrible Turk,” forgot about the Armenian question, and made Turkey an ally and a crucial member of NATO.

Western politics of sectarian sympathy is always entangled in cold calculation and expediency.

Claims to liberate the Muslim women in Afghanistan, to stand with the Sudanese victims of massacres in Darfur, or to sympathize with the Yezidis, are largely fleeting. The support for this or that minority community is thus ephemeral. And it is premised on the willful denial of other individuals, groups and nations among whom these minorities have long lived.

The perverse irony of Trump’s arbitrary executive order is that the salvation of Christians of the Middle East is not even his primary rhetorical object; it is an afterthought. His main goal is to appease his nationalist American constituency, which has been fed a steady diet of anti-Muslim propaganda for decades, and which has watched one American president after another bomb one Muslim country after another.

Although the white supremacist groups within Trump’s base, and among his advisers, may indeed rejoice at his order, the truth is that Trump is pretending to be tough on “radical Islam” with a much larger American public in mind.

His order is not intended to protect the alleged victims of sectarian violence in the Middle East, most of whom have been Muslim. Nor can it be justified by the most tendentious understanding of national security that advocates collective punishment given that it excludes the countries most associated with terrorism, namely Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt.

Rather, it is a deliberate effort to stigmatize further and demarcate which racial and religious groups — Arabs and Muslims in this instance — belong in this country, and which do not. This bone tossed to Trump’s supporters will never be a lifeline to the innocent victims of sectarian fanaticism in the Middle East.

The fate of the Christians there is, and has always been, tied up to that of their Muslim compatriots.

By Ussama Makdisi

Ussama Makdisi is professor of history and the first holder of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair of Arab Studies at Rice University in Houston. – Ed.

(Tribune Content Agency)