In yesterday's post, I mentioned Texas Congressman Lamar Smith's outrage over April's Department of Homeland Security report warning of right wing extremism and how he said it amounted to "political profiling," and that DHS is "using people's political views to assess an individual's susceptibility to terror recruitment."
Steve Benen turns the tables and asks, "What if they weren't white guys?" What if the shooting of Dr. Tiller and the Holocaust Museum shooting and the murder of three police officers in Pittsburgh and the Unitarian church shooting in Knoxville where two victims died were committed by... Muslims?
Imagine if James Von Brunn, Scott Roeder, Poplawski, and Adkisson were all Muslims.
What would the rhetoric be like? What kind of legislation might congressional Republicans offer? How many special reports about the "epidemic" of domestic Muslim violence would Sean Hannity host?
How willing would the public be to give up civil liberties to respond to the attacks? How loud would the laughter be from conservative leaders when liberals warned against racial profiling?
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3 comments:
the answer of course, would be everywhere. they wouldn't let ANY cable/network show pass them by. nor would they keep it to the airwaves. they would be all over the internet, speaking about it on the floors of both houses, disrupt every Congressional hearing...and on and on and on
I believe white people in America acknowledge the fact that a white person has committed a crime. However, when a white person commits a crime, it doesn’t stick to the entire race. For instance, after 9/11 every Muslim was viewed as a terrorist. Though if a white person had attempted the same attack, white people in America would not assume that other whites were terrorist or dangerous. The Oklahoma bombing didn’t put a terrorist label on whites nor did the Columbine High School Massacre. Our society is quick to profile a person negatively by their race until it involves a white person.
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