This institution, COMMENTARY, has been at the forefront of the conversation about radical Islam since the publication of Bernard Lewis’s seminal article “The Return of Islam” in January 1976, forty-one years ago. Almost 30 years later, in September 2004, Norman Podhoretz published his seminal “World War IV” about the nature of the civilizational struggle between radical Islam and the West. In between and since, COMMENTARY has published literally hundreds of thousands of words on the subject.

I bring this up in the context of Donald Trump’s executive order suspending all refugee entries from Syria, which is based, the president says, on protecting the United States from radical Islam coming to our shores. Indeed, nothing could be more important for the future of the United States, and nothing could be worse than enacting policies that are theoretically designed to serve that purpose but which complicate it immensely instead.

The refugee executive order is not a policy based in fact. The facts do not support it. The facts since 9/11 do not offer the hint of a suggestion that refugees who have already gone through a vetting process pose a terrorist threat, either here or (as yet) in Europe. The most horrifying recent acts, the ones that triggered Trump’s initial announcement he wanted a total ban on Muslim travel to the United States, involve radicalized homegrown native-born citizen terrorists. Omar Mateen of the Orlando massacre was born in New York. Tafsheen Malik of the San Bernardino slaughter was born in Chicago (his wife, who came into the country because she married a citizen, was from Pakistan, not any of the countries named in Trump’s executive order). The Bataclan killers in Paris were born and raised in Belgium, not in Syria. And so on. Only the Tsarnaev brothers, who committed the Boston Marathon bombings, count as refugees, but they came after securing political asylum from Russia—another country not on the list, obviously.

So what does this tell us? It tells us this is a policy based on feelings. It is the very partial fulfillment of a wild and radical campaign promise made hurriedly after the San Bernardino killings to ban all Muslims from the United States. Given the very partial nature of it, the policy is simply an immigration-restrictionist version of the classic liberal approach to problems; just do something. And do it big.

And like such liberal solutions, it is also a form of virtue-signaling to those who support such wild ideas. It’s a way the president who got their vote flatters them for their seriousness of purpose and their uncompromising understanding of the need to pursue the truth no matter the cost. Already, apologists and cynics alike are all pointing out Trump is merely doing what he said he would do during the campaign. Well, that’s not really true; you might even say he has taken the coward’s way out for failing to follow through on his proposal to ban all Muslims. After all, his promulgation of a mass Muslim ban in late 2015 was one of the many reasons many of us were horrified by his candidacy and opposed him, and he won the nomination and the election anyway, so as with everything that’s happened since election day, no one should be surprised.

Which doesn’t make it good policy–taken on its own terms—as a way of preventing terrorism inside the United States.

There are only two solid defenses of it. One is that the United States posture toward refugees is entirely voluntary; we need not accept them if we don’t wish to. The problem there is the harsh judgment of history when we haven’t, though we could have. While it’s a solid argument, it’s an awful one, morally and, indeed, politically.

The second is that the political correctness of the Obama administration made it impossible for prior officials to do the kind of screening we need—screening to ensure not just that terrorists don’t enter our country and stay here, but that radical Islamists who believe in the supremacy of sharia and promote a specifically non-American view of the proper political order of our liberal republic are kept out as well. That, I believe, is the theory undergirding the baffling decision (apparently by Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller at the White House) to suspend all entry even by permanent residents with green cards who have traveled to the seven banned countries and are there now. The speculation is that this has been done to close a sharia/terror loophole as follows: Someone who goes back to visit can get radicalized and could be the next terrorist so if you want to dot all the “i”s and cross the “t”s you’ve got to keep them out, too.

But in both these cases, it appears even the Trump administration is too politically correct to say any of this out loud, so how are its people going to prevail in an argument about it?

That’s why I say this is a policy about feelings—about feelings relating to terrorism and sharia and Islam itself. It is a policy that, in its most dangerous iteration, conflates Islam with radical Islam precisely because it is not accompanied by an argument that separates the two. Rudy Giuliani gave the game away on television this morning. According to The Hill:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R) said in an interview on Saturday that President Trump had previously asked him about legally implementing a “Muslim ban.”

But Giuliani during then disputed the notion that the president’s sweeping executive order barring refugees and people from seven predominantly Muslim nations amounts to a ban on Muslims. “I’ll tell you the whole history of it: We he first announced it, he said ‘Muslim ban,'” Giuliani said on Fox News. “He called me up, he said, ‘put a commission together, show me the right way to do it legally.’” Giuliani said he then put together a commission that included lawmakers and expert lawyers. “And what we did was we focused on, instead of religion, danger.” What Giuliani was admitting here is that the overarching goal was a Muslim ban, but the dial-back was to focus on “danger” rather than “religion” even though “religion” was the true target. His panel of experts understood a religious test could not pass constitutional muster, so they came up with a face-saver. In the end, Trump wanted this to fulfill his campaign promise—to show he’d follow through. Bannon and Miller, it seems, want to use it to send an ideological message about the new, harsher, more no-bull foreign policy approach they are championing. What the people who will actually have to implement the policy and defend it think—people like the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security and the like—was not taken into consideration. The feelings ruled.

So if this is a policy about feelings, feelings about building a wall not only between the U.S. and Mexico but between the U.S. and a whole bunch of other places around the world, counter-feelings deserve a hearing as well. So let me tell a story about my feelings.

In 2006, speaking before an audience in suburban Chicago synagogue at an event sponsored by a conservative Jewish organization, I heard the first boos from a friendly audience I’d ever heard. I was asked a question about immigration and the outrage then being expressed on the Right at George W. Bush’s immigration reform package. I said, simply, that as an American Jew, I considered America’s openness to immigration the very reason for my existence and one of the nation’s glories. As an American Jew, I considered the knowledge that hundreds of thousands of potential refugees from Nazi Germany were turned away under the restrictions placed on immigration in a 1924 act of Congress to be one of the great tragedies of our time. Given these facts, I did not feel it would be moral for me to speak out against relatively loose immigration.

The boos startled me because we were in a synagogue. But angry questioners went at me, that night and many other appearances to follow over the years, with the simple question: “Don’t you believe in enforcing the law?” And they were sure they had me. For how could I, a law-and-order conservative, defend illegal immigration when it was, in fact, illegal? All the pro-immigration arguments aside from the simple moral framework I had proposed—that immigration was a net positive for our economy, that crime had dropped over the course of the past decade even as illegal immigration from Mexico had surged so it couldn’t be a crime producer—could not answer that simple question. The way 12 million Mexicans, in particular, had come to the United States and settled here was illegal. Period.

We were actually talking about two different things, but I have to admit we were both conflating them. I was talking about the importance of accepting refugees and immigrants fleeing persecution generally, but my view had slid over from that into a more “let everyone in” view that was somewhat antinomian given the nature of the law at the time. They believed they were talking about illegality, but I don’t really think they were.

Those driven to rage by illegal immigration— rather than, say, those who have come to accept the powerful but problematic argument that illegal immigration has depressed working-class wages in the United Sates—are operating on the basis of culture, not policy. They believe the country cannot absorb these people and shouldn’t have to; that recent changes in the way our country functions give them no incentive to become good citizens or believers and participants in the American experiment, as was the case with previous generations of (legal) immigrants. The organizations that exist to promote illegals do not promote the United States but rather a multicultural worldview that says it is racist to insist on a common language in English and a common belief in American ideals. The more serious voices against freer immigration are right about this. It is a huge problem, and by rejecting the American gospel even as they insist on the right of illegals to live here and share public benefits and the like, these organizations have irresponsibly, foolishly, and reprehensibly helped feed the backlash against them.

It is shameful that liberal culture in the United States is no longer willing to say those who come into this country need to become Americans, and indeed, that is the kind of PC that “helped give us Trump.” Living here is a gift to those who were not born here, and it confers an obligation to become part of the American idea and the American experiment.

But if Trump and his denizens are unwilling to make that argument—and they are because, after all, in their eyes this country isn’t great any longer and is a disaster and makes bad deals and is awash in crime and carnage—then they are justifying the argument against them that they are making horrible policy for naked political advantage based in disingenuousness. And that’s no way to run a country.