Real Agenda?
Katherine Kersten from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune suspects that she may have found the real agenda driving the incident of the six imams who were removed from an aircraft due to their suspicious actions. She may well be right.
On Dec. 1, a curious report on the grounded-imams incident at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport appeared on the website of the Iranian Quran News Agency. The report quoted extensively from Madhi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation. The foundation is the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, "the world's most influential Islamic fundamentalist group," according to the Chicago Tribune….
….But the report on the Iranian website, which has appeared on a variety of Muslim websites worldwide, had a larger primary focus. After the imams incident, it quoted Bray as saying Muslims want "new, broad-sweeping legislation that will extract even larger financial and civil penalties for any airline that participates in racial and religious profiling."
The report is optimistic that Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, will lend his support to new legislation. Ellison, it says, has expressed his opposition to "such racial and religious profiling." Ellison, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
One piece of legislation in the works is the End Racial Profiling Act. It is an important priority of Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, whose district includes one of the largest Muslim populations in the country. Conyers introduced the bill in 2004 and 2005, but it went nowhere. Now the alignment of forces may be changing. Conyers will probably be chairman of the House Judiciary Committee when the new Democratic-controlled Congress convenes next month.
Conyers has been trying for years to force this legislation through. Up until now it has gone nowhere. Putting restrictions on security personnel would be disastrous. If they spend their time trying to meet arbitrary statistics rather than actually focusing on keeping people safe, sooner or later somebody will slip onto an airplane that should not. It is not just the six imams, either. There is a full court press going on here with other media outlets. For example there is this item in today's Washington Post:
Profiles of Men Who 'Fit the Description'
The stomach flutter starts as a cop strolls up, or a patrol car flashes its lights, or two officers stand atop the escalator at the Jamaica Center in Queens and run their eyes over the subway riders.
"I see a cop and I can't help it — I feel butterflies," said Tareaphe Richards, 21, a college student with an oval face and husky good looks. "They'll pull me aside sometimes because they say I fit the description. Yeah. Young black male. I always 'fit the description.' "
Dwayne Deacon nods as Richards finishes. They are standing in the student center at York College, a publicly funded junior college in Queens with a predominantly nonwhite student body. Deacon is fine-featured and dark-hued with a white do-rag and a trace of the West Indies in his voice.
The Post even admits this anecdotal and unscientific; more about feelings than about actual statistics. But that doesn't stop them from putting two pages of this up.
The Washington Post interviewed 12 young black men in Jamaica — streetwise and college students alike — and each said he had been stopped by police at least three times. The Post interviewed 12 young white men in Greenwich Village and Tribeca in Manhattan. Just one of them reported ever being stopped by an officer, for skateboarding in a subway station.
This was by no means a scientific study and some of the facts undergirding the stories are uncertain. Even the black men interviewed tended to agree that New York's police are not as aggressive as they were in the 1990s, when special units stopped and frisked 16 innocent young men for every one they arrested.
We have no way of judging how these men were selected either by the police or by the Post, so it is a double whammy meant to induce a feeling, a perception, that there is something amiss. But there is no real evidence. But there appears to be an agenda all right.
Other Links to this Post
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Don Singleton — Thursday, 14 December , 2006 @ 12:16 pm
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Right Voices » Blog Archive » Were The Flying Imam’s Just A Publicity Stunt? — Thursday, 14 December , 2006 @ 12:24 pm
By cfaller96, Thursday, 14 December , 2006 @ 11:53 am
So, what is the “agenda,” in your opinion? And are the people mentioned in your post acting in concert to advance this “agenda?”