Pardon my ignorance - I'm not American and haven't followed this news - but how is everyone conflating it with "muslims"?

I mean, my country has some 140M muslims (India), and my neighbors have some 330M muslims.

As a layman, I just read the order and I thought "oh, so it's all war torn countries...but what's Iran doing in there?" not "oh, it's all muslim countries"

because 'ban muslims' was the intent according to the administration

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/29/tr...

Because Trump went to election on "a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States" [0, donaldjtrump.com]

The fact that it was implemented as a ban on citizens from the most prominent Muslim-majority countries (as seen by the eyes of the average American voter, who forgot about Saudi Arabia) could be interpreted as a way for Trump to say he kept his pledge while not being instantly impeached for not protecting the Constitution as is the job of the president

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20170130001335/https://www.donal...

How are those the "most prominent Muslim majority countries?" They don't have he largest Muslim populations, etc. They're a list of the most unstable Muslim-majority countries.

Iran is not one of the most unstable Muslim-majority countries, and the ban on Iranians is creating lots of problems here. Iran's inclusion in the list is purely political.

Prominent in the eye of the electorate. Your typical American has no idea Indonesia is majority-Muslim. "Unstable" does match that since they show up in the news a lot. But countries not on the list such as Saudi Arabia have several confirmed islamic terrorists and yet aren't on the list.

> They don't have he largest Muslim populations

This is a canard. Indonesia is the largest 'muslim country', but it's not who we anglo countries think of when that term is used. You're trying to support an order made on emotive grounds with non-emotive facts.

> They're a list of the most unstable Muslim-majority countries.

Iran is a lot more stable than Egypt at the moment. However, Egypt is the #2 destination for US military aid ($1.3B, next in line is Iraq with $300M); it's not like they're going to be on such a list.

Because it's "Muslim majority countries in which Trump doesn't have business ties"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/opinion/who-hasnt-trump-b...

Which is the exact question any sane person would be asking. He says he wants to ban all Muslims entering the country. He can't ban Saudi Arabia, UAE, India, Indonesia, etc. He bans entry from a list of Muslim countries with unrest, but smaller profile, and subsequently less (almost none) terrorist export.

I'm going to use a phrase I hate, because it's almost always misused.

He is virtue signalling to his electorate.

FYI, you don't need to use an archive, that's still up on his website: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-...

It was restored to the website after some blog software bug

So basically, it's just posturing? Or would the order be removed eventually?

The current order has a 90-day time limit.

After some Iraqis that got admitted into the US were found to have created an IED when they lived in Iraq, Obama added new "more stringent vetting" to Iraqi immigrants, and it added a month-long delay to new visa approvals for Iraqis. The administration at the time would not admit it was an immigration block, just a delay.

If this is actually a temporary stop to figure out better vetting, or just pointless posturing, or a more long-term block, nobody outside the White House knows for certain.

however he didn't create the list of the countries that were banned.

How is that relevant? Isn't it even worse if he just took some list of countries he doesn't know the rationale behind their inclusion and banned them?

In tech, this is a problem with things like random half-assed anti-spam lists that people find and adopt with no critical thinking behind.

It's relevant because it means that all the people pointing to the choice of countries as proof that Trump is a racist, doesn't really care about national security, is driven by his own commercial interests, etc are talking nonsense - and most likely partisan nonsense at that, since the list comes from the previous administration's border policy. In particular, anyone who claims that only a racist would think those countries are high-risk and uses this to point fingers at Trump rather than Obama is on dubious ground because it's Obama's administration that decided people from those countries were high-risk. Also, bear in mind that this is ostensibly a temporary thing while they come up with a more suitable permanent policy.

There are, of course, reasons why the countries on that list were there in the first place too - mainly recent terrorist attacks in Europe by people from said countries. I imagine it's not quite the list Trump's administration would draw up (there's talk of adding Pakistan, which is an obvious omission), but given how much flack and dubious accusations they received for literally copying Obama's list it was probably politically unwise for them to create their own.

From my understanding he used the same list for the same reasons from when the list was created by Obama's DHS; security concerns.

This is such a stupid talking point. It's like me setting up a bunch of gas canisters and then someone else coming in and burning those canisters, and then that person proclaiming "I didn't put the canisters there though."