As this story unfolds, I keep thinking of that great line by Ann Coulter.
"Now preboarding Muslim terrorists."
IF WE GET COMPLACENT THE WORST CAN HAPPEN AGAIN
You know, if you're a long time Rantingprofs reader (hell, if you're a casual and periodic Rantingprofs reader) that it angers and frightens me to see the mainstream media seemingly work to downplay the threat we face from our enemies, the threat we face right now, right here. In the fight against terrorism, our best defense may be taking the fight to the enemy, but next in line comes a vigilent population, and a population lulled into complacency by definition cannot be vigilent.
We aren't even talking about the right issues. We haven't even developed the vocabulary to allow us to have a debate about the issues that we need to be discussing. We face a determined enemy trained to infiltrate loyal but identifiable civilian populations. What the hell do we do? Simply decrying "racial profiling" as if what we were talking about were the same as pulling over black motorists on the vain hopes of a drug bust is insane.
But it slips out during the hearings of the 9/11 commission that a policy has been imposed upon the airlines -- with no public debate that I ever caught -- that if more than two Arab-looking passengers are given extra scrutiny per flight, an airline can be fined. Could they at least have set the policy at, you know, the size of the actual hijack teams? Because otherwise that isn't a protection of civil liberties. That's an obstinate refusal to face the truth, to face our current situation, a refusal so obstinate that it's putting political correctness ahead of the public saftey.
I'm not insensitive to the fact that we are talking about an innocent and loyal civilian population. But it's a population that's being used here, and we'd better find a way to talk about that that does better then set arbitrary lowball figures for what constitutes discriminatory behavior, numbers lower then the size of what we know to be terrorist operational cells composed of, you know what? Arab looking young men. No, of course that doesn't mean every group of five Arab young men are terrorists. The question is, given those two facts -- now what do we do? My argument is, we'd better provide those on the front lines of our security a bit more flexibility then "look at more than two people and we'll fine you for racist behavior." |
