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More dhimmitude at my alma mater, where, of course, incoming students were made to read a partial and misleading translation of the Qur'an after 9/11 -- violent sections omitted, of course.
Now comes Daily Tar Heel columnist Jillian Bandes, who has been fired after writing a column entitled "It’s sad, but racial profiling is necessary for our safety":
I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.I don’t care if they’re being inconvenienced. I don’t care if it seems as though their rights are being violated.
I care about my life. I care about the lives of my family and friends.
And I care about the lives of the Arabs and Arab Americans I’m privileged to know and study with.
They’re some of the brightest, kindest people I’ve ever met.
Tragically, they’re also members of an ethnicity that is responsible for almost every act of terror committed against the West in the recent past....
You also can’t debate that of the 19 hijackers on those planes, all 19 were Arab.
And you can’t debate that while most Arabs are not terrorists, sadly, most terrorists are indeed Arab.
Given this combination, I want some kind of security.
Done in a professional, conscientious manner, racial profiling is more likely to get the bad guys than accosting my 12-year-old pipsqueak of a brother on his way to summer camp.
When asked if she had a boyfriend, Ann Coulter once said that any time she had a need for physical intimacy, she would simply walk through an airport’s security checkpoint.
I want Arabs to get sexed up like nothing else.
And Arab students at UNC don’t seem to think that’s such a bad idea.
“(Racial profiling) really doesn’t bother me,” said Sherief Khaki, a first-generation Egyptian-American and representative of the UNC-CH Arabic Club.
“So a couple of hours are wasted. Big deal.”
Said Muhammad Salameh, a junior biology major: “I can accept it, even if I don’t like it. I don’t want to die.”
Professor Nasser Isleem, a man for whom I have complete and utter respect after merely two weeks of sitting in his Arabic 101 class, said, “Let them search.”
“It depends on how I’m stopped, but if it is done in a professional manner … ”
Then he nodded.
“There were Muslims in those buildings, too.”
Some people say that racial profiling will make terrorism a self-fulfilling prophecy, or that it’s somehow unfair to designate certain individuals as being more likely to commit an act of terror than another.
They’re wrong.
If 19 blond-haired, blue-eyed, Caucasian Jews had plowed into the World Trade Center with two jumbo jets, I would demand to be interrogated every time I browsed Cheapflights.com.
After each interrogation, I would offer the official a cup of joe, then heartedly thank him for his efforts. And I would not be any more inclined to blow up innocent civilians as a result of it.
Neither would Sherief Khaki. Or Muhammad Salameh. Or Nasser Isleem.
Well. Profiling is ultimately of limited value, given the fact that "Arab" does not equal "Muslim," and that we are facing a threat from an ideology, not a race. Profiling would not have caught John Walker Lindh or José Padilla. Nevertheless, Bandes has many good points and makes them effectively.
What happened next? The Muslim Students Association fired back: "Columnist was offensive, inaccurate, disrespectful":
Our main criticism of Bandes’ article is not in what it argues but the way that she argues her point so disrespectfully. : “I want all Arabs to be stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within one hundred yards of an airport.”Although we appreciate the journalistic hook, it was an attention-grabber, sensationalistic and forced us to read the column; however, it offended us all within the same sentence. The image of naked Arabs in a public airport is not only truly horrifying, but it is also reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib photos where Iraqis were also “stripped” down for information about terrorists....
Our qualms with journalistic language aside, we take offense to the manipulation of the quotes from Arabs to support Bandes’ limitedly researched article. After we spoke to both Muhammad Salameh and Professor Nasser Isleem, we realized that they were outraged at having their views on racial profiling misrepresented.
For example, Salameh’s response to the use of his statements was “Quote me as I say!”
His quote from Bandes’ article that “I can accept it, even if I don’t like it. I don’t want to die” is an example of the journalist’s cut-and-paste method. In actuality, Salameh said to Bandes, “I’m not comfortable with it, I’m not happy with it, but I can accept it.”
The “I don’t want to die” part of the statement was given much later in the conversation in reference to Salameh’s Islamic stoicism in accepting his fate if he died in the World Trade Center — not Arab strip searches at airports. Salameh is, in fact, infuriated at the way he was represented in the article, considering his involvement in diversity activities and clubs (such as Psi Sigma Phi, a multicultural fraternity).
Interestingly, a similar story emerged when the MSA contacted Sherief Khaki, who told us that he was misquoted and misled. Khaki said that he “felt as if he was used for 30 minutes just so (he) could say one line about racial profiling.”
Similarly, Professor Isleem was approached by Bandes under the guise of writing about Arab reaction after Sept. 11. After speaking with Isleem personally, we discovered that someone else had been misrepresented through Bandes’s faulty journalistic endeavor. Their conversation had been cut and pasted to fulfill the expediency of her article.
Had Isleem known the true subject of the article, he would not have chosen to be affiliated with the piece. Isleem is a distinguished member of our faculty and would never agree to be “stripped naked” if he got within 100 yards of Raleigh-Durham International Airport.
Then Bandes was fired. DTH Opinion Editor Chris Coletta explained that it was because of Bandes' use of the quotes, as the MSA had outlined in its statement:
Might as well get to the point: I fired Jillian Bandes yesterday.And not because I thought she was a racist or an idiot. She is, in fact, neither — and even if she were, I wouldn’t have fired her for those reasons.
I fired her because she strung together quotes out of context. She took sources’ words out of context. She misled those sources when she conducted interviews.
In other words, she conducted journalistic malpractice, and that’s simply not something I, or The Daily Tar Heel, will tolerate.
However, Bandes points out that she did not misquote anyone, and the MSA did not establish that she did:
But what I did was not journalistically out of bounds. My sources agreed with racial profiling, and I simply added my two cents.I was also fired for apparently misleading my sources on what I was writing about. I thought I had made it clear that my article was about both 9/11 and racial profiling when I spoke to each individual.
As I wrote, I focused more on the latter topic. And I regret misleading them, even if I had no intentions of doing so.
But after asking each source several times what he thought of racial profiling, even if I did not explicitly tell them, I would’ve thought that they would understand what a large focus of my article would be about.
I’m deeply saddened that my sources have been harassed and have received death threats. I’m slightly put off by the profanity and hatred that has been thrown my way, and I’m extremely resentful for being called racist.
Join the club, Jillian: crying "racism" is a chief weapon of those who would deflect attention away from Islamic terrorism and what we must do about it.
Anyway, what we have in sum is this: a student columnist writes a column using flamboyant language that apparently embarrasses those whom she quotes, although she quoted them accurately. She is then fired after the MSA complains. But what is the MSA? And what about an honest discussion of the legitimate points Bandes raised? It has been rendered impossible by the furor over her even daring to raise them. And so dhimmitude continues to gallop forward unhindered: it is impermissible even to consider various ways we can defend ourselves against Islamic terrorism.
Posted by Robert at September 18, 2005 8:14 AM
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This is proof that the Muslim takeover of the US is well under way and gathering momentum, aided and abetted by political correctness gone mad. Had Jillian Bandes suggested that they should strip-search 80-year-old caucasian Christian grannies and waved Muslims through with no questions asked, in the world we inhabit following 911, she would still be in a job and getting rave reviews from the PC nutjob brigade. And if the members of the Muslim Students Association aren't happy living in the US and happy with its laws, then its time they were permanently kicked out to whichever Islamic craphole they or their parents came from. It would save a fortune on security measures.
Posted by: Spirit Of 1683![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 18, 2005 9:42 AM
Mr. Spencer writes: "Profiling is ultimately of limited value..."
When it comes to matters of life and death and self-defense against an enemy that can strike at random and suicidally mass-murder innocents anyplace, anytime, then even measures of "limited value" must be pursued. (What does "limited value" mean, anyway? Every measure is of "limited value", since no measure has "unlimited value".)
"...given the fact that "Arab" does not equal "Muslim,"..."
This is the specific limitation Mr. Spencer has in mind. However, no one with their eyes open about the threat of Islam (such as we here at jihadwatch) could possibly deny that there are innumerable Muslim Arabs who need to be surveilled and searched. Just because there also happen to be innumerable non-Arab Muslims doesn't mean that profiling Arabs would not have effective value.
Secondly, one can pat one's head AND rub one's stomach -- at the same time! I.e., we can profile Arabs and also profile Muslims in general -- Arabs would be a subcategory of Muslims which we would give a degree of extra attention to, since it is only rational to accord extra degrees to phenomena that exert an extra degree, and Arab Muslims so far are more likely to be terrorist than, say, SE Asian Muslims (which is not to say that SE Asian Muslim terrorists do not exist -- of course they do; I am talking about NUMBERS here, not the simple-minded binary choice of Yes/No, Black/White). What we clearly can't do is profile everyone -- which seems to be the current theory leading to our current policy of mechanically random searches. Another subgroup of Muslims to which we should give a degree of extra attention are Pakistani Muslims, it seems. A third subgroup would be North African, to the extent that they are distinguishable from Arabs (a lot of historical interbreeding there can make this more difficult).
"...and that we are facing a threat from an ideology, not a race."
Again, this is true, but one would be irrational to ignore the fact that Islam has obvious ethnic accents -- and a rational self-defense would reflect these accents through some sort of prioritizing hierarchy -- Arabs deserving the most attention, Pakistanis second most, North Africans third, etc.
"Profiling would not have caught John Walker Lindh or José Padilla."
No system of profiling is perfect. A few exceptions will get through the cracks. It would be irrational, however, to let those rare exceptions, such as a Lindh or Padilla or the black Jamaican Lindsay Jermaine of the London bombing, have equal weight with the preponderant numbers that outweigh them.
Nor is any rational system of profiling static; it should change with new data. If we started to see a trend where white converts like Lindh or Adam Gadahn began to OUTNUMBER (let alone even come close to EQUALING) Arab Muslim terrorists, then of course our profiling should flexibly adapt to that reality.
Methinks that Mr. Spencer is rather disingenuously camouflaging an ethical distaste for racial profiling behind language couched purely in pragmatic terms ("of limited value"; "ideology not race"), with no hint or trace that he thinks racial profiling is ethically wrong.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper at September 18, 2005 9:58 AM
PS: minor correction, the black Jamaican of the 7/7 bombings was Jermaine Lindsay, not Lindsay Jermaine.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper at September 18, 2005 10:02 AM
Gimme a break, this seems a clear cut case of journalist malpractise. What's everyone getting their panties in a bunch over?
And yes, her piece certainly was in "bad taste". If Blandes thought she was doing the racial profiling position a favor with her article she could not be more wrong. There are infinitely more effective ways she could have broached what is, like it or not, a very sensitive subject, especially considering her likely *audience* (duh, Journalism 101, hellooooo?).
No, no "dhimmitude" on this one, sorry guys. Blandes has herself to blame.
Posted by: spect8or
at September 18, 2005 10:18 AM
spec8or,
I agree, these comments were over the top and don't help the cause of fighting the islamofascists. Perhaps we need a guidebook for those out in the public sphere on ways to oppose radical islam that will not appear (to most normal people)to be prejudiced. Common sense ways to say these things, which are difficult to say given the multicultural miasma.
at September 18, 2005 10:33 AM
I wouldn't have written a piece on profiling anything like the piece in question. However, this is getting very predictible. If someone on the Left pushes a radical agenda the cry is for "free speech" and nobody gets hurt. If the speech comes from the other side, there is a dismissal with no hearing or due process.
I favor an open marketplace of ideas. The simple fact is that no speech, however out of bounds, if slanted Left, can get anyone fired. Rank hypocrisy on display time and again.
Posted by: Beagle at September 18, 2005 10:58 AM
I have a slightly different take on the commentary written by Jillian Bandes. All of her sources claimed that she had misled them and that she had misquoted them. I very much doubt that. I smell a great big RAT...namely the Muslim Student Association. They put pressure on the students and the professor to retract their statements and to discredit Jillian. Remember, Islam tolerates no questions and no criticism. I believe that the student who told her that he didnt like profiling but accepted it because he didn't want to die probably came the closest to the attitudes of many Muslims. But, he spoke the truth out loud and, as a Muslim, he should have never done that and was probably pressured and/or threatened by the MSA. Jillian Bandes is another victim of the worldwide and often successful movement by Muslims to shut down free speech. She can join the ranks of Paul Harvey, Dr. Laura, Michael Graham, Pastor Danny Scott, the professor from DePaul University and many more on the ugly receiving end of those belonging to the "religion of peace."
Posted by: maryrose at September 18, 2005 11:12 AM
I have a slightly different take on the commentary written by Jillian Bandes. All of her sources claimed that she had misled them and that she had misquoted them. I very much doubt that. I smell a great big RAT...namely the Muslim Student Association. They put pressure on the students and the professor to retract their statements and to discredit Jillian. Remember, Islam tolerates no questions and no criticism. I believe that the student who told her that he didnt like profiling but accepted it because he didn't want to die probably came the closest to the attitudes of many Muslims. But, he spoke the truth out loud and, as a Muslim, he should have never done that and was probably pressured and/or threatened by the MSA. Jillian Bandes is another victim of the worldwide and often successful movement by Muslims to shut down free speech. She can join the ranks of Paul Harvey, Dr. Laura, Michael Graham, Pastor Danny Scott, the professor from DePaul University and many more on the ugly receiving end of those belonging to the "religion of peace."
Posted by: maryrose at September 18, 2005 11:39 AM
Our main criticism of Bandes’ article is not in what it argues but the way that she argues her point so disrespectfully.
Oooohh, disrespect....humiliation, why that's worse than death to them. Other religions are treated with disrespect on a daily basis and no one cares, let a muslim (bomber) peep and mutter, and everyone scrambles to placate him.
at September 18, 2005 11:59 AM
Brandes did not argue her point "too disrespectfully." The main criticism should be that she was far too respectful, unctuous in her praise of this or that Arab who agreed with her proposal. Who cares when it comes to individual and national security that a few Muslims will state that they agree with the proposal. What if there had not been "Sherief Khaki. Or Muhammad Salameh. Or Nasser Isleem." on that particular campus, or anywhere. That should not be brought into it at all.
She was too respectful, far too correct, far too eager to seek justification in the support of some Muslims.
No such justification is necessary.
at September 18, 2005 12:37 PM
No matter what we do in the US -- no matter how far we have come from the days when institutionalized racism indeed caused harm to some US citizens -- the left and the entrenched powers of minority "leadership" who require a vibrant victimology in order to weild power will never cease accusing the US of "racism"
Now a terrible nexus allows Muslims to exploit the entrenched self serving false claims of the victimology of minorities in America, and the leftist haters of America eagerly jump on the bandwagon to stoke up the racism vitriol... Sadly this nearly guarantees that ANY discussion about countering Islamic Jihad will be deflected and muddied by arguments of "intolerance" "bigotry" and "Islamophobia..." This clever ruse must be repudiated at every turn.
Muslims in general, and Arabs in particular (be they Muslim or Christian) are among the world's oldest practitioners of exploiting victimhood and martyrdom in order to win concessions. They are the perfect cultural parasites to exploit America's history and her current reluctance to conduct any policy actions which might risk the label of "race based" or "racist." We must learn to become inured to such calls by Muslims and Arabs. We must become insensitive to their accusations which will be endless in any event. Charges of racism and "Islamophobia" were levelled against us before the death toll had even been tallied at ground zero -- and no doubt will continue whether we target them or not in this fight against the Muslim Jihad.
We must never forget that within days of the 9/11 atrocity Muslims were seen UNIVERSALLY claiming that THEY were the victims of the 9/11 attack, first by maintaining it was completely unjust to associate Islam and Arabs with the terror , despite all of the obvious evidence of such. Fast on the heals of these lies they trotted out mendacious accusations of widespread "backlash" against them for their ethnicity and religion. What a revolting spectacle to witness -- Once again the in the aftermath of a Muslim transgression we witness an age old methodology... and it served them well... They successfully deflected blame from themselves and their religion claimed that they were the real victims and demanded special treatment and protection... What was most telling to me was the fact that their post facto claims of victimhood dovetailed so nicely with the professed claims of the terrorists themselves as victims acting out against injustice --
What an amazing mechanism! Each new Muslim transgression becomes a new forum for new pretexts for more Muslim transgressions -- the target culture becomes fatigued and confused while the Muslims gain tactically. They are all in it together -- they all gain by each Muslim atrocity -- our main challenge is figuring out a way to make it too expensive for them to continue to use this successful tactic as they have ever done. What will it take to make it unprofitable for them to wage jihad? I think the answer is uncomfortable and may sound extreme:
Vast numbers of them must begin to die each time one of their ummah acts out against the rest of us -- we must begin to exact an EXTREMELY HEAVY TOLL from Muslims for their tactic of Jihad -- the toll must exceed the profit they reap through their very successful tactics of barbarity!
Posted by: jsla
at September 18, 2005 2:30 PM
Islam is not a "race", unless it needs to present itself as such in order to scream racism and discrimination (despite the fact that Islam still permits slavery and the Arbic word for slave is "abeed" the same word for black). We don't need to profile Arabs, i.e., people who appear to be middle Eastern, but Muslims. The problem is not Arabs,the problem is Islam.
Posted by: Bohemond_1069 at September 18, 2005 2:37 PM
"We don't need to profile Arabs, i.e., people who appear to be middle Eastern, but Muslims."
We do need to accent an ethnic profiling, because Islam itself has ethnic accents. It would be irrational to ignore this, and assume that Islam is equally composed of all races. It could be, theoretically, but it isn't.
And even if a country's law enforcement proceeded to apply rational discriminatory security measures based upon Islam alone and avoided discriminatory security measures based upon the ethnic accents represented in Islam -- the end result, practically speaking, would appear no different than if it had been based upon ethnic accents. Why? Because those ethnic accents are there in Islam. Islam is not composed of exactly equal parts redheaded Irish, white-haired Scandinavians, brown-haired Slavs, black-haired Arabs, phacoid-eyed S.E. Asians, etc.
Rational law enforcement, in the context of self-defense against random, horrible attacks on innocents, when dealing with unmanageably large numbers of people requires categorization and prioritization. Which means, profiling based upon any relevant criteria.
Posted by: Dr. Pepper at September 18, 2005 2:56 PM
Dr Pepper is right about 'rational law enforcement'. Whats 'rational' changes with the pressure of 'need'. Because of the high probability of surprise terrorist attacks, and the real need to protect the public from them as best as possible, whats 'rational' is swinging to the radical side. Only a few people 'like' this state of affairs. Most just reluctantly accept it as part of the deal. In America, I dont think we have seen 'radical' yet. That will come about after a massive attack or a series of suicide bombers in American pizza parlors. All these issues like racial profiling, the Patriot Acts 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. ect, will amplify, and take on more severity. Soon, no one will be able to go anywhere except to work, the grocery store and back home, where we can spend endless hours comlaining on the internet, or watching more endless hours of old John Wayne cowboy movies on cable. . We will all have been effectivly 'locked up', but we will feel more safe and secure...Maybe...
Posted by: duh_swami at September 19, 2005 8:25 AM
Let's see. A gun-totting, swaggering guy swinging a chain is approaching me on the street. Should I "profile" his as a possible mugger or perhaps murderer and move away? Hmmmmm, what should I do???
I "profile" all the time. I decide who to approach, which people to allow into my home or near children. This is a tool of self-defense and self-preservation. Not all profiling is "racist" or bigoted. We understand that Islam is not a race and that Muslims can be of any race or ethnic group.
This isn't rocket science. We must come up with a more appropriate profile.
Posted by: epg at September 19, 2005 2:37 PM
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