Originally Posted by
Beetlegeuse
What today is called "racial profiling" used to be called "common sense." Re-branding is what socialists/progressives do whenever one of their plans falls flat on its ass. Which happens a lot. Remember "global warming?" It's now "climate change" because earth's climate has been changing for four point three billion years, so no one can deny it's happening, right? So when they want to remove the stigma from the antisocial behavior prevalent in racial minorities, they re-brand the recognition of this behavior as "racial discrimination."
Do you know what "discrimination" is? Discrimination is the ability to recognize a difference. Traffic lights only work because motorists can discriminate red from green. "Discrimination" only takes on a negative cast when socialists re-brand it.
Before you can get onto any airline flight into or out of Israel, you have to undergo an interrogation. They call it an "interview" but it's interrogation by another name.
TODAY, if you're 91 years old, a woman, your passport gives your surname as Horowitz and you have a crudely-tattooed six-digit number on your left forearm, the interview lasts 11 seconds, tops, and ends with an apology from the interrogator.
But if you're 23, a man, your passport gives your surname as al-Musawi and you're flying in from Tehran, Iran, ... the interview could take two hours. If you're lucky. If you're not lucky, or if you give the interrogator some persecuted muzzy attitude, the interview might be continued at Club Gitmo, and might not end until your children are old enough to follow in your footsteps to become homicide bombers.
That's why airline security in the US is so fucked up. We keep trying to not offend the muzzies so they won't go all alahu akbar on us. If they want to travel by air, strip them naked, x-ray the fuck out of them, and if nothing looks suspicious, nail them in a wooden crate and let them fly in the cargo hold. They can have their clothes back when they've arrived at Dearbonistan.
We didn't used to be this stupid. The 80s are still known as "the terror decade" because you had the PLO, the Greens, the IRA, the ETA, the Baader-Meinhoff group, the Red Army Faction, the Shining Path, the American Indian Movement, and about a hundred other splinter groups blowing up shit every time network TV aired a hair care products advertisement featuring Farrah Fawcett. I know this shit from first-hand experience because that's how long I've been fighting terrorism.
Back then there also was a rash of Cubans hijacking US airline flights and diverting them to Cuba. Which I never understood anyway. First of all, Cuba struggles to keep people in, not out. You'd think they would subsidize tickets for immigrants. Second, if you've got the price of a plane ticket to Poughkipsie, Havana is only another $14. So why risk life in prison over charges of air piracy? Doesn't speak to highly of the intellect of the Cuban hijackers, if you ask me.
Anyway, in 1979 I was flying back from a scuba vacation in the Bahamas and was standing behind a Hispanic man about my age in the departure customs line at Grand Bahama airport. It was taking a long time to get to the front of the line and when there still were two or three people ahead of us, he turned to me and said, "Why don't you go in front of me?" I asked him why I would do that and he said, "It's going to take me a lot longer. I have a Cuban passport."
Back then it made sense that young Cuban men got extra scrutiny before they got on a commercial flight, so they did it. "They" meaning the government. Which inconvenienced him, but not me. Which was as it should have been.
I went into Iraq a couple of months after the 2003 "invasion" began and didn't come home for almost four years. And when I did, I got strip searched before I could board a domestic commercial flight for home.
I came in on an Air Force transport and landed at Fort Bliss (as misnamed a place as there is on this planet). I hadn't been on American soil for more than 1000 days. Fort Bliss and the city of El Paso jointly use the same airfield, so I flew in to Fort Bliss and out of El Paso on the same runway. But before I could leave I had to be skin searched, one step away from a body cavity search.
Why? I was a man traveling alone on a one-way ticket with a US destination paid for in an Arab country. I fit their profile, at least in part. The fact that I was just returned from the motherfuckingwariniraq cut exactly zero muster with the TSA because they feared they might "radicalize" some imaginary muzzy on the edge who otherwise might have become CEO of Westinghouse. If we only wouldn't piss him off, he'd become a productive and contributing member of the American infrastructure.
Back in those days there had to be dozens if not hundreds of Americans coming through the El Paso airport in the same predicament every goddam day. But better they all be inconvenienced than the one potential terrorist on the brink.
Can you imagine the rage that put me in? Not just me but the other tens of thousands of Americans subjected to the same treatment? I'd been putting my ass on the line, dodging bullets and (mostly piss-poorly-aimed) Soviet-made artillery, eating sand and shitting cinder blocks for years -- YEARS -- so that Americans could shop at Walmart without worrying that there are bad people in this world. And trust me, at that moment in my life I was not in the habit of letting murderous rages pass quietly.
Soldiers coming home from Vietnam were spat upon at the airport by San Francisco's finest. Me, on the other hand, I got groped by a government employee in El Paso.
What's important is not that it happened to me but that it's still happening every day to tens of thousands of American civilians, almost 18 years after 9/11. Eighteen years later, there's no fucking doubt where the danger imitates from. And it's criminally stupid not to acknowledge that the muzzies are the problem and to stop inconveniencing the rest of the population.
97% of the Muslims in the world today will tell you with utmost sincerity that they're not radicals and they don't support the Islamo-Fascists. And that's the exact same song they'll sing until the day that the other 3% take over the world. At which point the song will be, "We were behind you all along."
There's no one on earth who is under such imminent and perpetual danger from the Arab Muslims as the Israelis are. Fuck the progressives' re-branding of "discrimination," we should be profiling young Arab men.