There are no civil rights when you are approaching room temperature
Once again, we get a notification of possible terrorism in the air. By now, most of us have seen the news that a group of passengers on a Northwest Airlines were not exactly behaving well at takeoff - passing cell phones around, unbuckling from their seats. When the crew decides that they've had enough, the air marshalls took over and the pilot turned the plane back to Schiphol, Netherlands being escorted by Dutch F-16s.
Again, being politically correct, the men were described as being "South Asian" - in other words and being perfectly blunt - Muslim. Yet, the major media can't take things serious enough to correctly give us the real news. And remember, it was just a little while ago that the plot to take 10 planeloads of people out of the sky was broken up by those of the same faith.
True to form, who has to trumpet the inequality of the situation? Yup, CAIR - the Council for American-Islamic Relations (whose founders have ties to terrorist organization) immediately comes to accuse not those fomenting terror and panic in the skies, but those trying to protect us. And why am I not surprised that the ACLU is helping out?
LGF points out this Reuters report:
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The American Civil Liberties Union and a leading Islamic group on Wednesday accused security officials at New York’s JFK airport of racially profiling Muslims.
Wait a sec here...
A few things come to mind quickly. One is the story about the boy who cried wolf - crying out that the wolf was coming too many times had the other folks in the story, over time, ignoring him. Just like when the Italian-American groups were reacting years ago about Italians being discriminated against all the time when the Mafia was being dismantled, I am beginning to believe that CAIR is wearing out its welcome.
It seems that nothing is faster in the universe than the time between another attack by Islamofascists and this group conducting yet one more press conference to decry an on-going or soon-to-be backlash and accusing the rest of us of rascism. And they hardly ever speak in detail against those that precipitated the actual problem.
Anyways, back to the story:
“The price to pay for racial profiling is too high,” Dennis Parker of the American Civil Liberties Union told a news conference. “All people should be treated in the same way regardless of their race, their ethnicity or their religion.”
The news conference, convened by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, highlighted the case of an Iraqi-born U.S. family, whose members said they were held for six hours, questioned and searched at John F. Kennedy Airport.
Sorry, I have no more tears for this nonsense. We are so politically correct that we can't even name the enemy (remember the flack Bush took for saying "Islamofascist"?)? So PC that we cannot do the real work that has to be done? Let's repeat something from above:
“The price to pay for racial profiling is too high,"
No, it is not. There will come a time that we will realize that if we do not do racial and religious profiling in the name of fighting those that wish to enslave or kill us, more of us will die. I do not wish that part of that price include my life, or the life of my family. There is truth to the phrase "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all of the terrorists lately have been Muslim". Yes, there will be others (re: Oklahoma bombing) but just like in ordinary life, you cannot use the exceptions to create good policy. I am convinced that we are at war - we need to act like it. Review your history to see what civil liberties were curtailed ON A TEMPORARY BASIS during war time (and then restored when the war was over).
I think that I can speak for others that if some are inconvenienced to ensure that the rest of us stay safe, so be it. If a certain segment of the world's population is trying to kill the rest of us, then common sense says to watch that given segment more carefully than others. That is not to say that the other segments get a free pass, but given constrained resources, it makes sense to concentrate more resources in the troublesome area than those that are not. THAT is common sense enforcement. And if that certain segment doesn't like it, start cracking down on those that are causing the problem within your community (e.g., I'm still waiting for that mass of people that I keep hearing about, the moderate Muslims, to rise up and demand a stop to the terror).
The rest of the story:
Arwa and Sumia Ibrahim and their mother, Nagham Alyaqoubi, said they were held with 200 other people at JFK after returning from holiday in Jordan on Aug. 15, days after Britain foiled a plot to bomb U.S.-bound planes.
The 20-year-old twin sisters, who traveled home via Dubai, said people from several other flights from different countries were also detained. “Of the 200 people required to go through this procedure, we would estimate that 98 percent, if not more, were Arab, South Asian or Muslim,” Sumia Ibrahim said.
“We really do feel our rights were violated as U.S. citizens,” she said. She said she and her sister, who moved to the United States when they were five, were also asked their views on the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Being US citizens does not give one an automatic pass at passing through security. Frankly, I appreciate that our officials are finally starting to wake up (now that Norm Mineta is no longer overseeing the TSA) and do the security job right.
The women said U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials took away their passports. They said they felt degraded and humiliated by the whole experience and are considering legal action.
To me, this is just another case of self-importance - it is all about "me and my rights". Frankly, if the target population looked like me (a white male), I would want my government officials to be profiling guys like me - and I certainly wouldn't feel my rights were being violated.
When it comes down to it, I want to go home at the end of my stay here, and not in a box approaching room temperature. For if that happens, I will have lost any and all of my rights just because Arwa and Sumia don't want to be inconvenienced. Sorry, you lose.
One way to keep that from happening is to know that the right folks are screening the proper population segment(s) properly. And if paying more attention to those that fit the terrorist profile better than me, so be it.
