Sunday, November 11, 2007

There's a really good acreage out in Owen's Valley in California

They used to call it Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp during WWII. Because it looks like that's where we're headed:
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The Los Angeles Police Department announced a mapping program used by its anti-terrorism bureau to identity likely terrorist breeding grounds in Muslim areas.

Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief, detailed a joint program with the University of Southern California to compile mapping data demarcating Muslim areas deemed "at-risk communities," the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"We are looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated," Downing said.

Civil liberties and Muslim groups decried the project saying it is "nothing short of racial profiling."

"When the starting point for a police investigation is 'let's look at all Muslims,' we are going down a dangerous road," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California, in an interview with The New York Times.

Hussam Ayloush, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, said the project "turns the LAPD officers into religious political analysts, while their role is to fight crime and enforce the laws."

Downing said the Muslim Public Affairs Council accepted the program "in concept."

"We will work with the LAPD and give them input, while at the same time making sure that people's civil liberties are protected," Salam Al-Marayati, the group's director, said in the Los Angeles Times.
Or maybe we should make every Muslim wear a red crescent on their clothes.

Does anybody else get this weird deja vu feeling? Is this what we get to do because our preznit was a failure in college? Repeat every fucking bad idea through history just because he wasn't paying attention in class?

I have an idea, instead of making our own citizens hostile, hurt and disassociated from the larger community, how about we educate everyone on different religions? How about we have a Muslim open Congress with a prayer? How about we learn how tolerance and understanding lets disparate communities and religions live together in peace?

Then how about we address the real problems that create terrorism in the first place? How about we take a look at WHY people think it's a good idea to bomb a federal building in Kansas or send bombs through the mail to scientists or go on a shooting rampage on the east coast? Timothy James McVeigh, Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski, and John Allen Muhammad all had completely different reasons for the horror they worked to produce. The Muslim community on the whole is pacifistic, as is the Christian community. Should we infiltrate the enclaves of fundamentalist Christians because of the bizarre rantings of Pat Robertson?

Find disaffected youth willing to cause harm, find hate-filled diatribes against the Constitution and the American way of life, and you will pretty much need to go to every part and every section of society in this country. The forementioned terrorists were all educated, and two were white, two were ex-military, all three were male.

Hmmmm. Maybe we need to profile every single male in this country. Starting with the twit in the White House....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Bush family have been Nazis since before Hitler, doncha know?

Anonymous said...

It is always the case that children ought to be forgiven the sins of their parents, unless they repeat them. We should not forget, however.

ellroon said...

It's time to pry the greedy bloated fingers of the Bush dynasty from the reins of power. Let's pass a law that the Bush DNA is banned from office.