Trump's Ban, Palestine & My Galway Workplace.

Recently my friend Ihab Salawdeh gave a highly illuminating talk on his homeland of Palestine as part of our institute’s “My Country” series. The idea is for staff/students working at the Insight Centre for Data Anlaytics to present informative but light-hearted overviews of their country to their colleagues. With over 30 nationalities represented at our university research centre, we have had some excellent insights into places far and near. 

The jovial Ihab introduced us to a Palestine that not too many outsiders are aware off; a land where, in spite of Israeli military occupation and colonial settlements, is rich in natural beauty, culture and history. The inhabitants of the Holy Land are proud of their ethnic cuisine, folk dances, vibrant musical heritage, traditional dress, scenic hillwalking routes, churches, mosques, synagogues as well as ancient Roman/Greek/Jewish and Byzantine ruins. Bethlehem, Nazareth and Jerusalem are great world centres of tourism and religious pilgrimage.

Thinking about Ihab’s talk and the ‘United Nations of Galway’ that is my research institute at NUI Galway, I have come to the conclusion that Trump’s decision to ban travel to the USA for refugees and people from seven countries that have majority Muslim populations will have enormous and immediate negative ramifications not just socially, economically and politically but also scientifically.
Some of the researchers at our university centre are respected scientists from Syria and Iran who often as part of their work attend research conferences in the USA and elsewhere. America is now off limits to them and the research community of Galway, Ireland, Europe and the world will suffer as a result.
Trump will I feel extend the ban to other countries with Palestine probably at the top of the list.

With Trump promoting his newly discovered Christianity (of the conservative strand) and his support of American business entrepreneuralism, I should remind him that Steve Job’s father was Syrian and that the family of Jesus Christ fled to Egypt as refugees to escape probable death at the hands of a despotic ruler.

Trump is bringing a coldness and darkness to a United States that has such a proud bright history of welcoming immigrants escaping religious, racial and cultural persecution.

Destruction of a multi-cultural & multi-religious Middle East by ISIS

Kurdish female fighters defending Kobane against ISIS

The killing machine known as Islamic State continues its campaign of terror against the peoples of the world, this time targeting Kurdish and Turkish youth gathering together in Suruc to plan out the rebuilding of Kobane, a Syrian town that had been destroyed by the same religious fundamentalist movement a few months previously. 

IS practice a violent form of religion that uses ethnic cleansing, rape, slavery, crucification and beheadings to brutally carve out and supposedly reestablish a mono-religious theocracy that is a fantasy and never existed in history. The Middle East was always a mix of religions, ethnicity and ideologies in spite of the mad ravings of these sadistic misogynist psychopaths.

Sunni, Shia, Christian, Jew, Yazidi, Druze, and atheist must once again live side by side in the Levant and Iraq.
But this will never happen if governments of the region continue to condone rather than confront this cancer. Typical of this attitude is the Turkish government failure to hold a day of mourning for the victims of this massacre which occurred on its own soil (it did so for the recent dead of the anti-democratic sectarian Saudi king!). In fact they have helped the rise of ISIS as it shelled and slaughtered Syrian Kurds in full view of the Turkish army positioned on its border with Syria.