President Carter announced yesterday that the United States is breaking diplomatic relations with Iran and that all Iranian diplomats and officials will be ordered to leave the country by midnight tonight.

Carter acted hours after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini ruled that the 50 American hostages must remain in the hands of the militants occupying the U.S. Embassy in Tehran until the new Iranian Parliament decides their fate.

The hostages have been held 157 days.

Carter also cut off virtually all remaining trade between the two countries, prohibiting further exports to Iran, with the exception of food and drugs.

The U.S. will also invalidate all visas issued for future arrival to Iranians, issuing new ones or renewing old ones only in unusual circumstances.

Carter has instructed Treasury Secretary G. William Miller to prepare an inventory of outstanding claims of American citizens and corporations against the government of Iran, with the aim of seizing assets of the Iranian government in the United States to finance settlements of claims by the hostages and their families.

Front Page Magazine emphasizes:

Fourth, the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.

…Carter orders 50,000 Iranian students in US to report to immigration office with view to deporting those in violation of their visas. On 27 December 1979, US appeals court allows deportation of Iranian students found in violation.

The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 gave the President the power to do this. I am not a big fan of President Carter, but he was right on this one.

The article at Front Page Magazine concludes:

Now unlike Muslims, Iranians were not necessarily supportive of Islamic terrorism. Many were and are opponents of it. Khomeini didn’t represent Iran as a country, but his Islamist allies. So Trump’s proposal is far more legitimate than Carter’s action. Carter targeted people by nationality. Trump’s proposal does so by ideology.

Classifying Iranians as a group is closer to racism than classifying people by a racist supremacist ideology that calls for the mass murder and enslavement of non-Muslims, as ISIS is doing today.

One of the neater subsets of the 1952 Act barred the entry of, “(11) Aliens who are polygamists or who practice polygamy or advocate the practice of polygamy.”

I wonder which creed this might apply to.

Maybe we can all calm down now long enough to have a rational conversation on the subject.