New Travel Ban Garners Same Verdict in Middle East: A Slap at Muslims
In Iraq, where the initial ban had drawn the sharpest criticism, relieved officials welcomed President Trump’s decision to
drop their country from the list of nations whose citizens will be barred from entering the United States for 90 days.
Among citizens in the banned countries, the sense of injustice is compounded when they look at richer or more powerful neighbors, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, whose
citizens have carried out major attacks in the United States, yet which have escaped Mr. Trump’s censure because their governments are harder to push around.
Yet in the other six countries still on Mr. Trump’s list, his decision to push
ahead with the ban only stoked their sense of grievance and discrimination.
When the ban was announced in January, it prompted calls from some officials in Baghdad for Iraq to reciprocate with a ban
on Americans entering Iraq, putting the American-backed prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, under political pressure to act.
By DECLAN WALSHMARCH 6, 2017
CAIRO — Lighter, tighter and more carefully worded, the reworked travel ban announced by the Trump administration on Monday
aims to pass legal muster in the United States while meeting its stated objective of combating Islamist terrorism.
Yet Mr. Trump’s assault on the news media as an "enemy of the people" has uncomfortable echoes in many countries, and some have taken the parallels to signify
that the United States has entered an unwelcome phase.