'The American dream is dead': Dark legacy of Donald Trump's 'Muslim ban'

Donald Trump said he was determined to keep "bad people" out of the US — but in trying to stop this "problem", he's created an even bigger one.

Within a week of taking office, Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning the entry of citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and revoking more than 100,000 visas.

It was the first step in making good on his campaign promise to strike against Islam at home and abroad.

The move played to his political base, but it also seemed to fulfil the 2003 prediction of American al Qaeda propagandist and recruiter Anwar al-Awlaki, who had warned that one day the US would turn against its Muslim citizens.

"Muslims of the West, take heed and learn from the lessons of history: There are ominous clouds gathering in your horizon. Yesterday, America was a land of slavery, segregation, lynching, and (the) Ku Klux Klan, and tomorrow it will be a land of religious discrimination and concentration camps … the war between Muslims and the West is escalating."

As the administration insisted the immigration freeze was not a "Muslim ban", Trump adviser and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani offered a behind-the-scenes take, explaining on Fox News: "I'll tell you the whole history of it: When he first announced it, he said 'Muslim ban' … He called me up, he said, 'Put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.'"

The President himself chimed in with a tweet that once more blurred the lines between radicals and all other Muslims. "Everybody is arguing whether or not it is a BAN," Mr Trump wrote. "Call it what you want, it is about keeping bad people (with bad intentions) out of the country!"

The ban and the tweets only underlined the concerns of Muslims and other Americans who were worried about the future of civil liberties in America.

They had already been put on notice when news broke the First Family had taken part in a private service on Inauguration morning conducted by a Southern Baptist preacher who was on record as calling Islam an "evil religion" that "promotes paedophilia" and emerged "from the pit of hell".

Those bad people, he said in another tweet, were "pouring in", and if there was another terrorist attack, it would be the fault of the "so-called judge" who temporarily lifted the immigration freeze.

They were made even more nervous when they heard comments by Mr Trump's then-press secretary Sean Spicer, who was asked about plans to overturn federal regulations to prevent discrimination on the grounds of religion, such as refusing to serve gays.spicer

"People should be able to practise their religion, express their religion, express areas of their faith without reprisal," he said without a hint of irony.

"And I think that pendulum sometimes swings the other way in the name of political correctness."

Muslims could only shake their heads when Mr Spicer described the shooting at a mosque in Canada where six people were killed as "a terrible reminder of why we must remain vigilant and why the President is taking steps to be proactive instead of reactive when it comes to our nation's safety and security".

The President, meanwhile, made no mention of that mosque attack — or one a few days later at a Texas mosque, which was burned to the ground.

All this made Mr Trump's subsequent claim that the media was ignoring terrorist attacks that much more bizarre.

"You've seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it's happening," he told soldiers in a speech at the US Central Command.

"It's gotten to a point where it's not even being reported. And in many cases, the very, very dishonest press doesn't want to report it. They have their reasons and you understand that."

"That's ludicrous," tweeted former Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt.

"It has been a busy day for presidential statements divorced from reality," anchor Scott Pelley reported on that night's CBS Evening News.

Mr Trump's unsubstantiated allegation came on the heels of repeated claims from aide Kelly Ann Conway that the media had failed to report on what she called "the Bowling Green massacre", an alleged terrorist attack that never happened.

What the media was ignoring was the trial of a white pastor accused of plotting to attack a small community of African-American Muslims in upstate New York.

The only outlet that reported on the story was the local newspaper in the Tennessee town where the trial was taking place.

"If he were Muslim, we would of course have heard of his sinister plot," wrote columnist and radio host Dean Obeidallah in The Daily Beast. "But as we have seen time and time again, terrorist plots by non-Muslims are met with a collective yawn by most in our media."

That was because news editors and producers in New York and Washington D.C., knew their audiences: "Islamic" terrorism generated headlines and ratings; short of blowing up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the actions of white racists rarely produced many eyes on the screen.

It was the same phenomena that meant Israel dominated foreign news coverage in the US media while crises in places like Southeast Asia and Latin America were largely ignored.

There had long been a deeply cynical trope circulating in American newsrooms about war and famine in Africa: "It's just more flies on black faces." Meaning that in the eyes of the audience, it all just blurred together, so there was no point covering the continent.

"News is what I say it is," David Brinkley, the NBC Nightly News co-anchor in the 1960s, once famously pronounced.

To a large extent, that was still the case of the editors and producers concentrated in New York and Washington D.C. Back when Brinkley was anchor, there were three major newscasts and a handful of national newspapers.

The internet age meant they had been joined by an array of cable channels and a plethora of online news sites, blogs and Twitter feeds. They each had their own ideological agenda that shaped coverage, but they also shared a need to play to the interests of their respective audiences.

Left, right or middle-of-the-road, they generally adhered to a common news agenda when it came to terrorism.

An examination of reporting in The New York Times and The Washington Post by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) found Muslims carrying out acts of violence received twice as much media coverage as non-Muslims accused of similar crimes, and in the case of foiled plots, Muslims received seven-and-a-half times the coverage.

One example cited in the study was the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three people and was carried out by a pair of brothers who were Muslim. It garnered 20 per cent of all coverage related to terrorism in the period of the study.

In contrast, a 2012 massacre of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin by a white man constituted just 3.8 per cent of the coverage; the mass shooting of nine parishioners at a Charleston, South Carolina, church by a 24-year-old white nationalist accounted for 7.4 per cent of the coverage; and a 2014 attack on a Kansas synagogue by another white man that left three dead accounted for 3.3 per cent of the reporting.

A University of Georgia study found a similar result. "(A) perpetrator who is not Muslim would have to kill on average about seven more people to receive the same amount of coverage as a perpetrator who's Muslim," researcher Erin Kearns explained.

The ISPU study found the disproportionate coverage was also reflected in sentencing. In cases of ideologically motivated violence, Muslims received sentences four times as long as those of non-Muslims convicted of similar crimes.

All of this seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of American Muslims. And each time they turned on their televisions, the future looked increasingly grim.

"Sadly, the American dream is dead," Mr Trump said when he announced his candidacy. Mr Trump had another segment of Americans in mind when he made that claim, but Muslims feared that might well be true for them.