Racism or Common Sense?
RCP BLOG
By Tom Bevan
Illinois Congressman Mark Kirk recently set off a firestorm with these remarks:
"I'm OK with discrimination against young Arab males from terrorist-producing states. I'm OK with that. I think that when we look at the threat that's out there, young men, between, say, the ages of 18 and 25 from a couple of countries, I believe a certain amount of intense scrutiny should be placed on them."
I can't for the life of me understand what people find racist or illogical about this. We are not talking about internment camps, we are talking about paying more attention to a segment of the population that currently has the highest statistical probability of being involved in terrorist activity. Forcing young, male Arab-American travelers to submit to the small indignity of a bag search at a slightly higher rate than the rest of us is hardly shredding the Bill of Rights.
But such a concept is too much for people like Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice whose recent argument that profiling won't make us any safer goes beyond sloppy to downright silly:
While we wait for the Al Qaeda hammer to fall, homegrown radical right-wing extremism continues to be dismissed. The fact is, extremists are already on our soil, hunkered down amid their mini-arsenals.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the mantra has been that we need to stop "them" over there so we don't have to fight "them" over here. Well, guess what? "They" are already here, and they are us.
All racial profiling does is gives us a false sense of security. It makes as much sense as taking a closer look at men who happen to be white and have some connection to Oklahoma City.
I'm with Dennis Byrne, who takes up the subject of Congressman Kirk's remarks today in a great column punctuated with this:
Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said she was "deeply offended" by Kirk's remarks, and I'm deeply offended that she's deeply offended, so she should apologize to me. She was deeply offended in front of a cheering immigrants' rights group, saying that Kirk's kind of thinking led to the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. No, this kind of thinking might have spared nearly 3,000 people from gruesome deaths from hijacked airplanes. |
