You forgot the correct answer, which is "Black Africans." Unless you're one of those people who hasn't ever asked themself who was SELLING the slaves.

And by the way, they're still doing it at present, although not many of them reach the "new world."


...Perfect example.

Using the logic of the ACLU, if a group of people were standing around a truck containing fertilizer and fuel oil, a white male such as myself would be no more worthy of suspicion than an 80-year-old grandmother in a wheelchair.

Thanks for illustrating that.

You're correct. Since the thread is about airline security, my post was not intended to encompass all aspects of the Israelis.

You don't really understand, do you? Religion is belief. No one is forced to practice a religion, no one must believe in a doctrine. An idea is not evil -- only the people who embrace it are evil.

To clarify,
You mean "only people who embrace evil, are evil."

Therefore, a/the religion itself, is not evil, but rather, those who would twist it for evil purposes are (evil, that is).

sob, thanks for letting us know how comfortable you'd feel on a plane full of recently tamed and harmless Japanese. This may be from "the opposite direction" but it's still a racial stereotype and it's just as false.

Pragmatically how successful do you feel your system of racial identification would be in seperating asupposedly harmless Japanese from a North Korean, Thai (they have a problem with Muslim seperatists too), Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippino, etc.?

By that logic, death penalties/ Life without parole should be the penalty applied to all crimes, since differentiating between varying degrees of crime is not allowed.

I think the religious aspect of the debate may be a dead end. The three Abrahamic rellgions have been at odds for a while. There will always be "extremist" on either side, whether Fundamentalist Jihadists (not the majority mind you), Right Wing Evangelicals who are bent on forcing their ways on everyone else, or Right Wing Likudites who want to destroy the Arabs and "return" Israeli borders from the Nile to the Euphrates.

You misunderstood.

The principle that is being argued here is whether racially profiling is beneficial. People who agree with racial profiling claim that it is beneficial (it does more good than harm), people who disagree with racial profiling claim that it is not beneficial (it does more harm than good).

Therefore, if it is beneficial it should be applied to all crimes. The harm factor vs. the good factor would naturally scale with the penalty for the crime - murder still produces a stiffer penalty than theft, racial profiling simply results in more arrests (depending on your position: by virtue of the numbers game or by virtue of targetting a race that is somehow genetically prone to the crime).

Now, there is a point which I haven't seen mentioned in this thread and I would like to make it.

The only groups which heartily believe in suicidal terrorism are Muslim fundamentalist movements. If you're going to screen for bombs in luggage, screen it all. But among people getting on the plane who are willing to crash/destroy the plane with them on it, only Islamic terrorists are willing to do so. It seems to make sense, therefore, that if you are trying to keep people from getting on the plane who could be planning to blow it up, looking primarily at Muslims will result in far better security than avoiding looking at Muslims for fear of lawsuits.

Granted, we shouldn't focus solely on those who look Muslim, but watching them a little more carefully seems fine to me.

You know it sounds logical, but the main problem is that:

What does a Muslim look like? Is there a consistent set of norms and standards that can be applied wholesale to a group of people? What identifying characteristics are reliable?

For example:

Turban, goatee or lots of facial hair, shifty gaze.

Or is it blond hair blue-eyes too? Lots of Muslims fit this description too.

You couldn't even say just Arab - Lots of Hispanics, mixed-race people, and random Asians look "Arab" too. Iranians are Muslim but not Arab. Now what?

If I'm some airport security screener getting paid $7.00/hr to check, do you think I could really tell? Or would I need some thick manual with an ID key?

Shaquille O'Neal is Muslim. Or do we only apply it to foreign Muslims? There are some Palestinians I know who look generically "white" to me.

I suppose we could issue "Muslim Identity Cards" but that's a can of worms.

In principle I see the logic, but there is no way to really put it into practice.

Precisely. When people say "Muslim" in this context, they mean "Arab-looking" and the problem is that most of your average Americans haven't seen that many different skin colors in their lives. Anything that doesn't fall under white, black, hispanic or east Asian is now "Muslim" to them. A coworker of mine is Indian. He could not look more stereotypically Indian, he looks like Ben Kingsley in Ghandi for god's sake and yet people mistake him for an Arab.

i dont have time to respond in detail to your post at the moment, jorgelito, so i'll defer until the weekend...for the moment, i dont think you necessarily have to go as far back in time as you are going, though the very general contexts you point to would ultimately figure and you would have to know something abut them in order to think in a differentiated way about this "fundamentalist" matter.

you already have a fine example of a regime instrumentalizing fear of a "fundamentalist" movement for its own political ends in algeria--teh fln was worried that it was behind in polls, so soon after this problem became clear, a sequence of massacres happened that were attributed to the islamic salvantion front (fis)--most of which were in fact carried out by the fln itself, it turns out.

now i want to be clear: i am not saying that the present american administration has gone this far--what i am saying is
1. almost from the outset, these movements have been used to generate fear in a given population
2. that fear has been predicated on a totally undifferentiated understanding of who was responsible for attacks and why
3. this fear was generated with the end in mind of helping the party in power to remain in power.

this political usage of "islamic fundamentalism" is being repeated in the states--this law is a fine fine index of it. one way to counter it is to insist that one think otherwise about these movements--seperate them from each other and from islam in general; think about the particular conditions that shape them (economically, generationally, socially, religiously, etc)--each step in such an understanding is a push through the logic of bushworld----which believe would not still be in place politically had it not been for the extended, cynical usage the administration made of fear to legitimate itself.

most of these movements have been underway since the early 1980s--the horizon for understanding them is often shaped by political and economic developments that have unfolded since the 1970s---signposts include the mobilization around the iranian revolution, through the rise of parallel groups in egypt, through the rise of parallel movements in saudi arabia, to the rise of movements superficially similar in western europe.

the general explanations include (in some cases) the nature and degree of state repression, the extent to which that repression drove political opposition into the mosques because theyu were among the only spaces not directly and often brutally repressed (such was the case in iran--the pattern repeats in many cases): in western europe, you have a whole host of other factors, liek the ending of the more open immigration policies that had obtained at least since world war 2 during the period of the oil shock, which fundamentally transformed the kind of relation you see between what was migrant labour and the spaces to which they migrate....

out of time, but the point is that when you talk about "islamic fundamentalism" you are not talking about a single phenomenon.

all this "facing reality" or "acknowledging the problem" talk in this thread is reduced to nothing by this fact alone: laws like those being discussed in this thread are not at all about facing reality: they are about facing a particular, cynical, incoherent way of enframing reality. outside the logic of bushworld, the "reality" being faced across laws like this is an incoherent fantasy.

jorgelito,

I agree that there is no formula for deciding who is a muslim extremist and who is not, nor would it be wise to focus all of our efforts on middle eastern muslim males, but again, looking at the extremes, it seems clear that there is a place in the middle and that a weighted approach as far as scrutiny would be appropriate.

The other general comment I would make is that unlike Christianity, Islam's Holy Book was written by one person, and as such is given extra weight as far as "truth" goes. Therefore it makes sense that entire nations are under "sharia" and Imams regularly preach the hatred that is contained.

This contrasts to Christianity where the differences in authorship and interpretation of the Bible have led (among other things) to radically different understandings and beliefs and that the most radical (i.e. the Fred Phelps crowd) are marginalized by the majority of society. Also, it is extremely rare that any "Christian" calls for the murder of another person and when it does happen (e.g. anti-abortionists calling for doctors to be killed), no nation-state or national leader supports them, but rather condemns them.

You cannot say this about Islam.

Disagree. The fact is, the paranoid 'bushworld' fantasia will be over in 4 years, with a 50% possibility of being replaced by someone from the Democratic Party.

Bush is dealing firmly with a very real threat. What do you suppose would happen if the same ideology that raized the WTCs to the ground did, in fact, get hold of WMD? Or is this outside the realm of your reality, too?

I am forced to admit you hit the nail on the head when you said I don't understand. After reading your statement that no one is forced to practice a religion:

I don't understand why the history books say that the US was founded by a group who no longer wished to be forced to practice a religion.

I don't understand why anyone would say Saddam forced people to practice a religion.

I don't understand why anyone would say the Taliban forced people to practice a religion.

A partial list of what the Taliban declared illegal:

Music, movies and television, computers, picnics, wedding parties, New Year celebrations, any kind of mixed-sex gathering.

Children's toys, including dolls and kites; card and board games; cameras; photographs and paintings of people and animals; pet parakeets; cigarettes and alcohol; magazines and newspapers, and most books. Talking with foreigners. Paper bags.

Penalties: Imprisonment, flogging, or execution. Religious police, part of the "Department for the Propagation of Virtue and the Suppression of Vice," roamed the streets. They carried broken-off car aerials or electrical cabling to whip women whom they decided were not properly observing the regulations.

But I'm sure no one was "forced" to go along with them.

I disagree with this statement when I think of slavery, child porn, and a host of other ideas that people have come up with.

And your statement is still wrong. It's a CULTURAL OBSERVATION. In spite of the aberration of the idiots with the Sarin gas in the subway, Japan's crime rate is admirable in relation to many countries (and no, I'm not going to bother to Google it to recite it for you.) The reason is cultural, not racial.

However, I wish you'd define a racial stereotype for me. If I said, "Most Africans are darker than most WASPs," is that a racial stereotype? How about if I said some types of surgery are more difficult on blacks? (And yes, I have an answer ready for that one.)

I would answer that if your response had any chance of being pragmatic, and if it had anything to do with my previous statements.

Since that is not the case, you will have to troll elsewhere.

anyone who gets sufficiently fanatical about a cause will give their life for it. It can be seen throughout history. It can be traced back to the Crusades.(christians destroyed one of their own ships to kill many more muslims) The Japanese suicide bombers of WWII are a prominant example but not the only ones. In Vietnam, the viet minh "death volunteers" attacked both the French and the Americans.

besides the fact that muslims can be white, black, brown, or even purple

I scarcely know where to start. Yes, Christianity by and large, has moderated itself. We took a long time to get there. We killed "infidels" "witches" and "heretics" too. I just don't think this is a point of pride...

I guess i'm waiting for your commentary on Christendom during the 30 Years War. Those differences haven't always been an impetus towards moderation or peace.

i'd rather stand with the ones who grieve that their tradition has been used to justify violence...

That is actually one of the bones that is picked in my other current thread; the idea that the sins of the father are visited on the son.

Like not feeling responsible for slavery, I do not feel responsible for the real or imagined sins of Christianity stretching back into history.

What I can feel responsible for is what Christianity is doing today and how I support it or work to change it.

Likewise, I don't expect Muslims to feel responsible for the invasion of Europe, but I do expect them to speak out against and actively work to change radical Islam (something many are loath to do).

i'm not saying that we bear guilt for witch burning. but we need to know that Christians who thought themselves loyal to God did that. we have, in our tradition, the seeds of things that are truely evil. knowing that they are there is the only way to avoid bringing such sins back.

where you see a fundamental essence of Islam that is amenable to radicalism, i don't. someone might have said the same of us. some still do. i just don't think the question is worth asking. are there people working to free their tradition, whatever it may be, from violence and injustice? Then i stand with them.

Yeah that's one thing I am just really getting sick of seeing here on the boards. Everytime an the issue of radical Islam, people always interject what Christians did nearly a milenia ago... like myself, or my catholic sect, is somehow cupable today for what went down then. Outside the fact that it doesn't factor in the time (see:relativism), how wars were fought, how immensly different politics were, how power broke down, and that even then the blood wasn't solely on the hands of christians; it has no relevance to the conversation today, at least how it is interjected.

Christianity has a long stemming tradition, a lot of it is dark. What I don't like is how we get no props for admitting to our sins of the past, how we asked for forgiveness (see: PJP II), and how nobody even recognizes the reforms tht have been made in the last 40 years even.

Bottom Line, Islam has a couple hundred years to catch up before it can even hold a candle to the Christian tradition as far as reform, dogmatic praticality, and relevance is concerned.

here martinguerre gets to the heart of the matter. everything written in the vaguest way supportive of the article at the start of the thread stages an understanding of "fundamentalism" as linked to some bizarre understanding of islam in general by essence. this kind of argument seems to work to the exclusion of information about islam that does not reduce it in its social complexity to a series of propositions from the texts around which the religion was elaborated. it works by partial quotation, combined with television imagery and material derived from a particular ideological context to generate imaginary views of islam and of its variants.

much of what i have been arguing by trying to push debate toward a more historically oriented view of this thing called islamic fundamentalism has been about trying to show just how huge the gap is that seperates understnding that is rooted in taking seriously contextual situations, in taking seriously differences between them, and the signifier "islamic fundamentalism" when it comes to thinking about the ostensible object in the world (the referent).

since the distance is pretty much insurmountable, then you have to think about this signifier "islamic fundamentalism" in other terms--what i wanted to argue was that it only makes sense as a function of the ideology of bushworld, it only is functional in that context.

given this, i do not see why the digression into dueling anecdotes about religions you like as over against religions you do not like is of any interest.

Ah, thanks for letting me know what my response to your yet-unseen ideas will be. That's a relief whew!
If you can't answer, just admit it. You'd lose much less face than you do by accusing me of trolling.

You won't corner me by getting me to admit that there are real biological differences between various groups of people that we understand as "races." Thus far, all attempts to define races quantifiably without exception have met with failure. Are you suggesting we perform various surgeries on people to determine their race before they're allowed on a plane? Streetcorner blood tests? Mandatory truth serum injections? What is the plan? Is this or is this not a thread attempting to justify racial profiling?

I recommend you read Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson. Oh and do it in the bathroom because I'm fairly sure your head will explode in the process.

When there are no logical answers, it's understandably tempting to turn on the smoke machine ASAP. I can't say I'm surprised.

Back in my college days, we used to have a big party at least once every two weeks, and often would have a smoke machine. I don't know what was in it to make the smoke, but I doubt highly it was good for us. Didn't get me laid either. On the other hand the hot tub parties :thumbsup:

that's fascinating, ustwo.

Nope, not healthy for you, body or mind. It's a good thing you got through college with your intellect intact...some never make it out with any sense left whatsoever.

Additional troll noted, then ignored.

Which is why I didn't try. If you weren't so busy trying to discredit statements I didn't make, you would notice I said "most."

Here's an example for you: If I were stocking a medical clinic in an impoverished area of the US, and most of the residents were black, I would normally stock it with more than the average amount of armamentarium to treat diabetes, since it is more prevalent among blacks.

However, by your reasoning, that would be "racist."

While I'm sure you're very proud of the plan you created above, what I'm suggesting is common sense, something lacking in your idea.

If I saw an urban black kid in a health clinic, and he/she was complaining of fatigue and achey joints, I'd be likely to test for sickle-cell anemia.

If it were a white kid who lived in a rural area of Minnesota, I'd be likely to test for Lyme disease. But then again, I'm a racist.

No, that's a conclusion you jumped to. If you recall, I didn't post a comment on the lead article. Since you were embarrassed by the article, you attempted to get the thread locked, even though it has now generated 987 views in less than five days.

In fact, my point is essentially the opposite of racial profiling. The ACLU, by injecting issues of race, is compromising the safety of air travel. Chief among their idiocies is that we must celebrate diversity by investigating prospective airline passengers with no consideration of the likelihood of their planning an attack.

It would not take a mental giant of a terrorist to arrange for ten or twelve of his cohorts to be on the same flight. If he was really determined, he could bring along his own ACLU-endorsed attorney to protest loudly if anyone wanted to search more than two or three of his team.


Undoubtedly based on your personal experience.

Further inability to answer noted.
Ha, nice try but no. You won't corner me by getting me to admit that there are real biological differences between various groups of people that we understand as "races." I admit that freely. That's not racism.

My plans were suggestions based on what I gathered from your posts above about what you mean by "common sense." Common sense is not a plan by the way, it's not something that can be taught or tested and apparantly from your inability to elucidate further it means nothing.
Again these are real biological differences between different groups of people, this isn't racism. The problem comes when you start using racial signifyers to decide who is and isn't more likely to commit a crime. An example of this might be if someone says they're so certain that people from a particular asian country are harmless and non-threatening based on their race alone.

Was that the reason I gave for asking for the thread to be locked? Let's review. I said, "there is a policy against posting content without comment, mods please lock the thread" I posted that under the false assumption that there was a policy against posting articles without commenting on them. Although this is a de facto policy that has resulted in the locking of many threads here, it is not a part of the rules (I believe this is what Rekna was implying as well). I actually hadn't read the article yet at that point. If I was only interested in locking threads I find disagreeable why did I praise the "masters of war" thread and then ask for it to be locked?
Well you haven't yet elaborated on your ideas of "common sense" so it remains to be seen if it is racial profiling or not. The ACLU is only interested in keeping race from being the only factor for determining who is likely to be planning an attack.
The ACLU would have no interest in proactively creating instances of discrimination, this possibility exists only in your dreams. In any case an attorney, ACLU or not, would have no basis to challenge any search, only detainment. And even then only if the only criteria for that detainment was race. If racial profiling wasn't being used there could be no problem. The rule you're so upset about does not exist as any DOT guideline. I thought I made that clear when I was thoroughly discrediting the allegations in the original article. But apparently you missed that so I'll post it again:

"
This isn't even the policy that you just quoted, nor is this policy to be found in any official DOT guideline. It seems to exist solely as a fabrication of right-wing "news" outlets. It is based on the testimony of one Michael Smerconish, an attorney and radio talk show host from Philadelphia who heard it from Southwest airlines executive Herb Kelleher who supposedly heard this in a discussion with Norm Mineta. So the allegations are hearsay. Hearsay is legal jargon refering to "Statements by a witness who did not see or hear the incident in question but heard about it from someone else. Hearsay is usually not admissible as evidence in court."

Why hasn't Herb Kelleher made these allegations himself? Is he afraid he might perjure himself in doing so?
Indeed, that book made me radically rethink how I understand race. Twain had a more advanced sense of what race actually was than most people do today, and that was 125+ years ago.

I hate when people use "statistics" or "data" to back up their racism. What "statistics" are we talking about here? One in a million vs. one in a billion? A brown arab-looking guy may be 1000 times more 'likely' to be a terrorist than an average white guy but the likelyhood that either are trying to board a plane with the intention to blow it up is still statistically insignificant.

It's not as if the terrorists haven't recriuted any white guys from America to join their army. We've captured a couple and there is bound to be more of them.

source link:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/20/234230/07

this is obviously summary, but the data it talks about is interesting.

the complete results are available here:

http://www.comm.cornell.edu/msrg/report1a.pdf

and are, if anything, more alarming than the summary version.

notice the correlation between folk who watch tv is and those who favor restricting the civil rights of muslims....restrictions that extend to the stuff debated on this thread. for some reason, i am less surprised by the correlation of christian beliefs and favoring restrictions. so much for brotherly love and all that.

this correlation between support for restrictions on civil liberties and television viewing is interesting, and is not a little alarming. i wonder if similar results would be had here. i suspect so. similar patterns seem to obtain for support for the iraq war, the belief that saddam hussein had something substantive to do with "terrorists" and so forth.

given indices like this, it is hard to hear conservative complaints about the "liberal media" and not laugh.

Thank you for acknowledging one of my points.


Childish insult noted. However, I never called common sense a "plan."

Once again, a deliberate misquote. I said CULTURE. Do you need a link to the post where I said it?


That's an interesting position for an "anarchist" to take.

Since you like to misquote me, it isn't surprising that you feel entitled to represent the ACLU as well.

As soon as you feel like discussing CULTURAL differences, instead of trying to invent racism where none exists, your posts might elicit some interest.

Until then, it looks like your repeated off-topic posts have pretty much killed the interest in the thread.

The American political machine has clearly whipped up plenty of fear, neurosis and paranoia - that certainly isn't news - It didn't take long for communists to be replaced by terrorists in the national psyche. Has anyone here read 1984? Try looking at what is going on here from a detached point of view. Who benefits from a scared populace the most? As roachboy said,

Doesn't that remind you of the communist infiltrationist paranoia of the 50s? The only people who benefited from whipping up that sorry mess were those trying to win on a National Security ticket. It's a whole lot easier to look as though you've succeeded in solving a problem you've inflated and exaggerated out of all proportion.

I think we should start detaining every fifth person who doesn't claim chinese citizenship. After all, statistically, around one out of every five people is chinese. If a quick look at the citizenship of a random cross section of travelers doesn't reflect this ratio than something fishy is obviously afoot. :hmm: