The Global War on Skin

In a post about conservatives offending American Muslims, the Carpetbagger quotes this from the WSJ blog:
New York gubernatorial candidate John Faso also has supported profiling, saying, “If a 25-year-old Muslim man who has been traveling frequently to Yemen or Pakistan tries to board a plane, then not only statistical analysis but also common sense tells us that he is more of a potential threat than the grandmother from Queens.”

Call me crazy, but I suggest that we pull aside anyone who has been traveling frequently to Yemen or Pakistan; especially old grandmothers from Queens.  That’s your common sense for you.  As I’ve said before, one of the big problems with racial profiling is that we really don’t know who the next terrorist might be, and if we’re focusing solely on young male Muslims, we will certainly be too lax with other people.  Not only are not all Muslims identifiable as being Muslim, but not all terrorists are Muslim.   And the more we target one group, the more they’ll look for someone who isn’t in that group.

And everyone knows that.  But somehow, conservatives convince themselves that all terrorists can be identified by skin color and religious affiliation.  So we’re going to let another Timothy McVeigh on to planes while alienating moderate Muslims and showing them that we really do have something against their religion and race??  Is that really their idea of common sense?  It’s almost as if they see these white terrorists as being on their team

Overall, this has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with racism.  These people have been trained to believe that non-whites are dangerous and this is just an excuse to target them.  As the Carpetbagger quoted from TNR’s Spencer Ackerman “Last week in the Weekly Standard, the apparent inventor of the phrase, Stephen Schwartz, dismissed those who'd be offended by "Islamofascism" as "primitive Muslims."