Demonstrators participate in a protest against U.S. President Donald Trump's executive order temporarily barring all refugees and seven Mideast and North African countries' citizens from entry into the U.S. in front of the White House in Washington D.C., the Unite States, on Jan. 29, 2017. (Xinhua/Yin Bogu)
As controversial as it is, the recent entry ban imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump on visitors from seven Muslim-majority states is reckless and dangerous to world order, said Egyptian political experts.
President Trump signed on Friday an executive order to put a 90-day ban on the entry of people from Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia and Iran, while barring all Syrian refugees indefinitely.
The decision has been widely disapproved by the seven countries in question, Western governments including those of Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Czech, as well as major world and regional bodies like the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU) and the Arab League (AL).
"What Trump did is a reckless move that does not reflect the real U.S. policy in this regard," said Bashir Abdel-Fattah, political expert and researcher at Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies.
He added that Trump wants to prove through the decision that he can adopt a U.S. foreign policy contrary to those of his predecessors and that he can turn his electoral campaign anti-immigration promises into actions.
"The decision is criticized inside and outside America itself. The whole world condemns this decision. So, I believe it will not form a general tendency of Trump's policy," Abdel-Fattah told Xinhua.
Following widespread protests at airports across the United States, a federal court in New York issued an emergency stay allowing all refugees inside the country or in transit with a valid U.S. visa, which challenges deportations under Trump's order.
"Trump's measure is temporary anyway even if implemented, as it was rejected by the federal court that allowed those relevantly detained to be released," said the political researcher, arguing that the U.S. president wanted to challenge those who doubted his ability to take anti-migration measures that would anger many Arab and Muslim states.
In response to Trump's restrictions, Sudan summoned the U.S. charge d'affaires in Khartoum to protest the ban and Iran made a similar move, besides slamming it as "a great gift to extremism" and "an open affront against the Muslim world."
Although there is no official comment from the Egyptian leadership, a senior lawmaker at the parliament's foreign affairs committee told a local newspaper that Trump's move would not contribute to fighting terrorism as much as it might lead to growing rates of extremism worldwide.
"Trump's decision is shocking, as it will anger the people of the concerned seven states and will lead to further clashes," said Egyptian lawmaker Tarek al-Khouli, urging the U.S president to reconsider such measures in order not to contribute to chaos across the world.
For his part, Hassan Nafaa, a political science professor at Cairo University, viewed the entry ban as "extremist and racist," saying it would have very serious impacts regionally and internationally.
"It is Trump's right to take the necessary measures to fight terrorism, but it is not his right at all to consider all the peoples of specific Muslim states necessarily terrorists until proven otherwise," the professor told Xinhua.
Nafaa lamented that the ban involves millions of people who have nothing to do with terrorism but happened to belong to states where terrorism grows for some reason.
"One of these countries is Iraq, where the aggressive war launched by the United States is the main reason for prevailing terrorism," he said, warning that "if the president of the world's biggest power continues to adopt this kind of behavior, it will cause perplex to the whole world order."
