Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Your Skin's Not White, Empty Your Pockets Abdul

Re: the proposal that Muslims will face more strenuous checks at airports than the rest of us from now on.
How close are we going to look for evidence of Islamism? Wasn't one of the people arrested in the recent crisis a Muslim convert? Wasn't the shoe bomber's name Richard Reed?
I don't normally do politics here, but if we're going to use ethnic origin or skin colour as the determinant (if that's the correct word), of the closeness of our investigations at customs, isn't that rather racist?

3 comments:

Bruce Hodder said...

And somehow the problems still don't go away. How about both our leaders, through some government committee or other, taking an honest look at why our foreign policy is perceived as anti-Islamic by talking to Muslims of all sympathies and doing what they can to address the problems?

Though I think Muslims of the more choleric variety also need to look at themselves AND US, and realise that probably two-thirds of the public, at least in Britain, oppose the occupation of Iraq and were appalled by Tony Blair's support of the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. Most of the people who died in London on 7/7 last year would probably have backed the Islamic cause in the Middle East if those lunatics with the bombs had asked them to...

domestic empire said...

The mistake we make is to assume leaders are not as smart as us to come up with the obvious common-sense answers that we all take for granted.

The other mistake we make is to assume they've got it all wrong and that they don't know what they're doing.

It's almost as if decisions like these were being made to deliberately inflame the situation wouldn't you say?

I think one needs to look at these initiatives from a different perpective before it begins to make sense.

Bruce Hodder said...

I like your balanced view DE. We can't assume that the people in charge are idiots any more than we should automatically accept what they foist upon us. They are not wrong all the time; they're not right all the time. But in this one I do fear they have it badly wrong--especially since the police and the security services seem to have done such a good job in heading off the last plot anyway. Why don't they just keep doing what they're doing, as long as they don't start raiding the wrong houses and shooting the wrong people again? Could it have anything to do with BAA's refusal to pay the Police the money they need to provide adequate security at the airports?