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What a terrorist looks like

Jill

By now, the story of Juan Williams losing his job over racist remarks is old news. And I think Williams, like Rick Sanchez, deserved to be terminated. Everyone is entitled to their views, but you are not necessarily entitled to express racist views at work (and your views can still be racist even if a lot of people agree with you).

Although I wonder: Why are Sanchez and Williams losing their jobs, while people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh still employed? I realize that Beck et al are largely employed by Fox News, which traffics in bigotry and racism – but O’Reilly, for example, is invited on shows like The View, which airs on ABC. Rush Limbaugh’s radio show is on WABC in New York. Pat Buchanan is regularly on MSNBC.

So what’s different between Rick Sanchez/Juan Williams and Bill O’Reilly/Rush Limbaugh/Pat Buchanan? Hmmm.

In more “media outlets that are not Fox news propping up the racism of white people,” see today’s Danielle Crittenden column in the Huffington Post. Crittenden labels herself a “terrorist profiler,” which she says is different from a racial profiler. Because racial profiling implies that she might be racist! And of course she is not. Her illustration of her great not-racism comes in an anecdote about taking a flight from Paris back to the U.S. She sees two men who look exactly like terrorists: Mid-twenties Arab men dressed in jeans and t-shorts. Call security!

The conclusion of the story is that she gets her family off the flight after she sees the men praying towards Mecca. They take a flight the next day. The original flight had absolutely no problems. But she’d do it again! What?

It takes some chutzpah to write a whole story about how you racial profiled someone, were totally wrong, and you’re not sorry at all. Oh and also everyone should be as vigilant as you about being sure that no young brown men in t-shirts are allowed on airplanes.

It’s also worth noting that the “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the attempted “Christmas Day bomber” were not young Arab men. Neither was the Unabomber, or Timothy McVeigh, or all of those dudes who regularly kill abortion providers and terrorize patients and clinic workers.

But for all of us who like Danielle Crittenden and Juan Williams are concerned about Muslims in Muslim garb, here’s a whole website dedicated to Muslims wearing things. Muslims wear so many things!

50 thoughts on What a terrorist looks like

  1. People like Crittendon are who make writing my thesis difficult. I’m an undergraduate senior in International Relations, and I’m writing my thesis on terrorism. I have spent the last two weeks searching for a definition of terrorism that doesn’t attempt to exclude anyone that is white. It is seriously annoying. The PIRA is just as much a terrorist organization as Hamas. The man who shot Dr. Tiller is just as much a terrorist as the person who killed Benazir Bhutto. But some people just want to push those people off, and prefer to designate them “freedom fighters” and “lone crazies” they’re not!! They’re all using violence and fear as a means to effect political change outside of the legal system! *
    /end grumpy rant
    * This is essentially the definition I use for my paper

  2. Jill, this is why I love your writing:

    Your views can still be racist even if a lot of people agree with you.

    I’m going to use that.

  3. Conservatives have spent 40+ years building up the virtue of irrational, emotional reaction instead of actually being objectively correct about anything- and we’re now seeing that come to full fruition.

    And of course, the difference between Sanchez, Williams and the talking heads is that Sanchez and Williams were dressed in ‘objective reporter’ hats instead of ‘commentator’ hats.

  5. People want easy answers. They don’t want to recognize that terrorists don’t wear enemy uniforms and stand out in a crowd. Interestingly enough, it does challenge our conception of friend versus foe. This could be a learning experience for us. We might be forced to acknowledge that people can’t be automatically and accurately judged based on a minimum of evidence.

  6. Crittenden and her husband David Frum are Canadian conservatives who prefer the U.S. I think they’re trying to be more American than Americans are. They’re both an embarrassment to many of us living north of the border.

  7. NPR fired Williams for more than just this incident, but it seems only fair to note that this comment was taken wildly out of context. On the show On the Media on NPR, they played the whole clip, and after he talks about the Muslim garb, he explains that Americans have to work against these knee jerk reactions to Muslims. Williams then goes on to point out that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian but was don’t blame all Christians.

    So was it fair to fire Williams? Probably based on other stuff, but in this instance everyone should really listen to the whole clip when he is actually arguing with OReilly. We make ourselves look bad otherwise.

  8. Heck, Comrade Kevin, even the Bush administration acknowledged that, tacitly. One of their big arguments for why they were allowed to kidnap and torture random brown people in Afghanistan was specifically because terrorists don’t wear uniforms. If they wore uniforms, they’d be soldiers, and thus be subject to the Geneva Conventions. (Not that I believe for a heartbeat that they wouldn’t have come up with some other excuse, if it were the case that the folks they wanted to kidnap and torture actually did wear uniforms.)

  9. It would be one thing to condemn Juan Williams’ views, but seeing how he already recognizes that they’re wrong in the full context of his conversation with Bill O’Reilly (which NPR, and Jill here also seems to ignore), his comments appear more honest and willing to engage with those biases in good faith. That’s the kind of conversation that we should be encouraging. I’d refer you to Tim Wise’s comments on the issue:

    http://www.timwise.org/2010/10/bikini-liberalism-juan-williams-implicit-bias-and-the-trouble-with-npr/

  10. I was thinking the same thing.

    Like, the Left is more forgiving to a white guy than a person of color.

  11. Although I wonder: Why are Sanchez and Williams losing their jobs, while people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh still employed?

    Because in a kyriarchal, racist system, with multiple tiers, people who look like Beck and O’Reilly and Limbaugh are afforded levels of protection that people with first names like “Juan” and surnames like “Sanchez” are not?

  12. Juan Williams was fired by NPR but got a big raise from Fox News.

    But yeah Limbaugh et al. are way more deserving of being fired, and aren’t being fired (and go on ABC and MSNBC) because they are white.

  13. I don’t think it’s fair to say that NPR as a whole took Williams’ comments out of context. NPR ombudsman Alicia Shepard headlined her post NPR’s Firing of Juan Williams Was Poorly Handled and refers to Williams’ comments later in the comment (with a link to a Fox news video–I prefer not to give them traffic directly).

    I realize that Shepard is “the public’s representative to NPR, serving as an independent source regarding NPR’s programming,” which is distinct from NPR program hosts and news analysts/commentators, so I kept looking–a quick search within the NPR website reveals this post from an NPR blog, highlighting criticism of NPR following the firing; the Tell Me More story offering more context for the comments (along with commentary from a scholar and a journalist); an AP story on Williams (which includes some of his response to the firing, like his references to fellow NPR employee Nina Totenberg’s remarks about Sen. Helms and AIDS 15 years ago)… should I go on?

    I’ve also heard the issue handled on multiple regular NPR shows, including what I found to be very well-balanced coverage on the Diane Rehm show Friday night. (I’m a little unclear on whether that was a rebroadcast since callers kept saying “good morning” and I’m on EST–it’s also worth noting that Rehm acknowledges her personal friendship with Williams at the beginning of the roundup.)

    That said, you know who makes me worried and nervous on airplanes? Anyone antagonizing the airline crew members, regardless of what they’re wearing.*

    Then again, I was once on two flights with a woman who identified herself as a nervous passenger and an MS patient. I also know she was a smoker, drank bourbon at ten in the morning (which she bought for the rest of our row**), was a ski instructor and restaurant owner, and a lesbian.

    Yet somehow I managed to come out of the whole interaction (which actually ended in her getting kicked off a flight, despite my attempts to intervene, after she smoked a cigarette inside the airport terminal and swore at at least one airline employee) without telling a national audience that white people, women with disabilities, bourbon aficionados, or athletic lesbian entrepreneurs make me nervous. (A task made much easier by the fact that I am employed neither by Fox News nor any other news outlet, sure, but also by the fact that I’ve made efforts to meet and learn about people who fall under all of the communities/identities I just mentioned.)

    *I do recognize that our concept of “antagonism” can be extremely subjective, and not without racial and other identity implications–I think Jill’s own story of her experiences with Delta Airlines illustrates that quite well.

    **I was maybe 22 at the time, and the other guy in our row said he had a business meeting so he declined his nip—and this is how I came to drink two mini-bottles of bourbon for the first time, on an airplane, next to a woman who was crying and just trying to get to her girlfriend in Chicago.

  15. I’m a Judgmental White Person profiler, and I won’t apologize for not allowing my children to ride on planes where there is even the slightest chance of them being exposed to their disgraceful behavior.

  16. Skeevy old white guys scare me more then young clean-cut brown guys. You know what scares me most of all? Those guys in the priest collars, or the mitres or the cardinal hats. You know they’re just waiting for the next inquisition.
    (Half snark. I like Catholics, but their leaders make me want to punch things.)
    And don’t even get me started on the tea partiers. Ignorance on parade- there’s nothing more depressing.

  17. That Rick Sanchez thing really did not seem on the up and up to me. Everyone who runs society’s big institutions do look a lot like Jon Stewart – they’re called white men.

  18. I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.

    You’re right – he very well may have been talking about white men, and just said “Jewish” by accident.

  19. @mk – I don’t think your experience is comparable, though. To deny that a great many Americans, myself sadly included, have a knee-jerk reaction of fear when seeing an Arab Muslim on a plane is to deny that we have been influenced by the nonstop barrage of racist messaging of “muslim=arab=terrorist” (rampant in the MSM and much of out societal dialogue over the last decade). If you have found a way to cleanse yourself of that influence please share your secret. Otherwise, I think it’s more dangerous to hold yourself harmless than to acknowledge that Muslims are facing a prejudice hat has been deeply ingrained in MOST of us, not just red-state conservatives and moderate liberal POC.

  20. je: If you have found a way to cleanse yourself of that influence please share your secret.

    Talk to lots and lots of Muslim people about their day to day lives. I’ve found that most Muslim folk like making a living, have hobbies, sometimes families, and so on. The Muslim people I know don’t really have time to suicide bomb buildings in the US.

    No, but seriously. If the problem is that you’re generalizing a few to the whole, then the solution is actually speaking to the people you’re prejudiced against and learning to treat them like people instead of walking-terror-machines. Re-humanize people that have been de-humanized by the media and politicians and the mass public.

  21. I agree with JE. I think it’s impossible not to be influenced by the MSM’s Arab=Fear barrage. What you do with that influence is the important part. Do you actually ask the airline to remove someone from the plane; do you give them dirty looks; do you promote your fear on national television… or do you swallow your comments, recognize your prejudice, and work against it both in yourself and in others?
    In the case of Juan Williams, it seems he may have been attempting to articulate this question – badly – and I agree that others – who happened to be white – have retained their jobs after saying far, far worse things. Unfortunately, when in the media, every sentence you utter will be parsed infinitely, particularly if you are not a white man. That being said, Juan Williams is likely no angel, and he’s doing very well for himself at Fox.

  22. je, I don’t think I hold myself “harmless” by any means. Less harmful than Juan Williams at the moment? Absolutely.

    I thought my footnote made it clear that I know even my discussion of antagonism is problematic, because unfortunately our perceptions of who’s “causing problems” are complicated by our own prejudices. Do I react the same way when a large, muscular man yells at a stewardess as when a petite older woman does it? Probably not–I’d be less likely to intervene when the person doing the yelling is twice my size.

    I absolutely acknowledge that Muslims face tremendous prejudice. That’s why, like PrettyAmiable, I’d rather actually get to know them than talk about how scary they are.

    Incidentally, folks might consider taking some implicit association tests. The results may surprise you. (I haven’t taken the Arab-Muslim IAT yet–I hadn’t been back to the site in a while, so I didn’t realize they had one.)

  23. Just an FYI, because this is a common misconception, but IATs are not individually diagnostic tests – the data are only meaningful when generalized over a sufficient number of trials with a sufficient number of subjects. That is because there is a lot of variability between individuals on a single trial, even compared to what they might score on subsequent trials.

    The demonstration trials are instructive when it comes to learning about the process by which implicit bias can be detected (again, across many participants) and the concept of implicit bias itself, but the results of a single trial for a single individual have highly questionable validity. That’s really not what these tests are designed for. It is also possible to fake them or influence the results through a social desirability bias (unconscious and conscious processes are not as separate as they are sometimes described!), especially if you are highly motivated, know how they work, and are only dealing with a single, relatively short trial – faking tends to be too effortful to be kept up across highly lengthy and repeated trials.

  24. Jadey, these are all really good points, and it was shortsighted of me to mention the IAT without going into any more detail about their context. (I even did some trials in Dr. Banaji’s lab when I was still an undergrad, so it’s extra irresponsible for me to do such a fly-by.) Thank you for raising the points.

    I do still think taking one of the demo trials is an interesting exercise, and I would encourage folks to participate in the research end of the site I linked. But then again I’d encourage participation in lots of different kinds of research–sociologists and psychologists always need more subjects.

  26. Back on topic, though:

    Jill’s point in the OP about McVeigh, the Unabomber, etc. is a very salient one. When a white Christian man sets a bomb or a fire or murders an abortion provider, I’m not hearing news commentators admitting that they get nervous around young white men in airports (whether or not they’re wearing crucifix jewelry and t-shirts bearing Bible verses).

    I also think it’s interesting to note that in these cases the discourse isn’t really about how these men are are misinterpreting the Bible or aren’t “real” Christians. Sure, Christian groups often try to distance themselves from these people, but we simply don’t have a Christian analog for the “Muslims versus Muslim extremists” rhetoric that so dominates the mainstream media narrative.

  27. @Pretty Amiable – I think you hit the nail on the head there. Talking to people who are different is the best way, from my experience as well, to demystify and counteract the fear that mainstream dialogue is trying to beat into us. As a general point, I don’t think it’s possible to erase all ingrained prejudice, a la “I don’t see color”, but by getting to know others I’ve definitely reduced my natural tendency to Other people who I don’t have occasion to know as part of my own social circle.

    @ mk – I think we’re speaking to two different points. I understood your comments about being bothered by people on airplanes who are antagonistic to mean that people who harass/antagonize/”make waves” on a flight make you nervous, which I understand and totally agree with. I understood your footnote to be an acknowledgment of the fact that reasonable people of different backgrounds may have a different idea of what constitutes “antagonism” sufficient to incite nervousness or discomfort. Also agree with that. I guess I was challenging, inartfully, the idea that just because one has rational fears about troublemakers on a plane doesn’t mean one can’t also have irrational fears based on deeply ingrained, even suppressed, prejudices of the type the tests you referenced are designed to highlight.

    I agree with you that there are better things to do about people who inspire a knee-jerk fear than to simply talk about how scary they are. I too would prefer to challenge and probe that fear, which includes getting to know/listen to other groups of people (e.g. Muslims) as I uncover latent biases against them. But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging that insipid fear that comes up out of the blue for some people when they are getting ready to board a plane and see a young Arab man about to board a plane – I think it’s important to talk about it, to acknowledge it and to dissect it publicly. I don’t think Juan Williams was about to engage in a very self-critical, introspective monologue, but I also don’t think it’s fair to write him off as just another racist Fox News commentator (which it seems that NPR and many of its supporters did) when Williams was actually speaking to the larger point that you made about how people *don’t* stereotype Christians based on the actions of white Christian terrorist Tim McVeigh, for example.

    The Muslims I know are also the furthest thing I can imagine from terrorists, but knowing people in even the most intimate way can’t protect us from the damage being wreaked upon our culture (and by extension, to us) by the current state of politics and its conjoined twin, fearmongering journalism.

  28. Jill’s point in the OP about McVeigh, the Unabomber, etc. is a very salient one.

    McVeigh and the unabomber weren’t christian. They were raised as such (but were not believers afak) but their religion is irrelevant, since religious bigotry/intolerance was not their motivating factor. The larger community that has to worry about being unfairly tarred is the small government/libertarian/conservative one (in the case of McVeigh) and the environmentalist movement (in the case of the unabomber).

    And there’s no shortage of people making a guilt-by-association argument there. For example, Rachel Maddow recently alleged that a GOP Rep had advanced warning of OK City.

    Nonetheless, even if some of the rhetoric (like Maddows) gets McCarthyistic, there’s no way to intelligently discuss McVeighs terrorism without referencing the larger movement and philosophy. Likewise, the Klan were not just racists, but white racists…as their whiteness is relevant to their terror. White-racial supremacy was their critical issue. Islam = Whiteness.

  29. Manju: And there’s no shortage of people making a guilt-by-association argument there. For example, Rachel Maddow recently alleged that a GOP Rep had advanced warning of OK City.

    I tried to find this because my experience is that Maddow is fairly well researched and am having trouble finding an article (outside of the announcements that she was doing a Timothy McVeigh special back in April comparing TMcV to government extremists). Can you help out? Thanks!

  31. As a general point, I don’t think it’s possible to erase all ingrained prejudice, a la “I don’t see color”,

    Even if you can manage it for a while, somebody will remind you quite pointedly. Discussing a planned social event recently (going to be very vague here, intentionally), and responding to the question, “Who all’s going?” I started listing attendees. At a certain point, I got, “Him, really?” I responded with, “Yeah, why?” but the fact is I had already been jarred into remembering that ‘Him’ was not part of the straightwhitechristian assumed default identity. “I dunno, he’s just” long pause “weird.” The pause, and the look of discomfort made it clear that the problem was that ‘Him’ is just not part of the SWCADI.

    I really don’t know which upset me more – the casual bigotry displayed by the person I was speaking to, or the fact that, in a split second, I knew exactly what the objection was, and had mentally Othered somebody in my own head because of the comment.

  34. mk 10.24.2010 at 7:33 pm
    Jill’s point in the OP about McVeigh, the Unabomber, etc. is a very salient one. When a white Christian man sets a bomb or a fire or murders an abortion provider, I’m not hearing news commentators admitting that they get nervous around young white men in airports (whether or not they’re wearing crucifix jewelry and t-shirts bearing Bible verses).

    It’s ridiculous to target Muslims, but can this supposed counterargument please go away? It makes no sense, because it ignores context.

    If we’re going to accuse people of having unreasonable fears then we need to do a better job understanding the basis for them.

    I have felt nervous around groups of young white christian men in the vicinity of abortion clinics, shuls, gay rights events, and all sorts of other places. That is because my association with those people is for a specific type of violence.

    Many different groups have become identified with certain targets of opportunity, and with certain types of attacks. It’s unrealistic to ignore the fact that, in the U.S., Islamic terrorists happen to be strongly associated with bombings and plane bombings in particular. Nobody seems to be worried that an Islamic terrorist is going to start shooting up the town, for example: in the mind of the populace it’s not the right style. And for that same reason few people are concerned with white christian people reading a bible on a plane, but are concerned with them in other areas.

    Now, the statistics are so small that it makes no sense to either distrust all white christian men who are near a shul, or all Islamic men who are in an airport. It’s stupid. But it’s not going to win any arguments if we don’t acknowledge why people feel as they do.

  35. It takes some chutzpah to write a whole story about how you racial profiled someone, were totally wrong, and you’re not sorry at all.

    I don’t think Crittenden made the right choice here, but I also don’t think that being wrong in her profiling should have convinced her that she made the wrong choice. There are *very* few terrorists, but being on a plane that is hijacked means probably dying. So if you have credible information that some people even might be terrorists (which I don’t think she had, but she did think she had) you probably want to avoid the flight.

    Imagine she decided from looking at them that there was a 5% chance they were terrorists. This is extremely high, as the fraction of airplane travelers who engage in terrorist acts is tiny (maybe 1 in 500 million). If she thought paying to spend an extra night in paris was at least 20 times better than being on a flight with terrorists, then that we later found out that the men were not terrorists doesn’t change anything. She believed, after all, that there was a 95% chance that they were not terrorists.

    As for being sorry, by getting off the plane she cost herself and her family time and money (though got to spend more time in paris) but she didn’t make things worse for the muslim men in question (they might even have gotten more room to spread out on the long flight). So who should she be sorry to?

    1. So who should she be sorry to?

      Um, the people who are harmed by the bullshit, racist, xenophobic ideas that she and people like her espouse?

      Usually Lurking — the difference is that groups of white Christian men hanging around with bibles outside of abortion clinics are, barring some very unusual and unfortunate coincidence, always there specifically to be pains in the asses. Best case scenario. Worse scenario, they’re there to harass patients. Worst scenario, they’re there to commit violence.

      Muslim people on planes? Are there because they have to fucking go somewhere that’s far away.

      The other difference? White dudes don’t face violence and systemic discrimination and terrified looks on a daily basis just for being white dudes. People who are visibly identifiable as Muslim (or who people think are visibly identifiable as Muslim) do.

      The reason that people feel the way that they do is because when a Muslim person hijacks a plane, the overwhelmingly non-Muslim U.S. takes this as a comment on Muslims in general. When a white dude blows up a building, though, he’s seen as an individual, an abnormality, because his white skin and maleness are revered and allow him the honor of being seen as an individual person, rather than simply the member of a group to which he belongs. The reason people feel the way that they do — unless, of course, they do get nervous whenever they see white dudes outside of government buildings, in which case they’re just extremely easily frightened — is because they’re bigots. That’s the reason.

      If you want to argue that we’re not going to get anywhere with that argument because people don’t like being called bigots, well that’s one thing. But to make it out to be that people aren’t actually identifying the problem because we’re not making excuses for their bigotry is bullshit.

      1. Usually Lurking — the difference is that groups of white Christian men hanging around with bibles outside of abortion clinics are, barring some very unusual and unfortunate coincidence, always there specifically to be pains in the asses. Best case scenario. Worse scenario, they’re there to harass patients. Worst scenario, they’re there to commit violence.

        Muslim people on planes? Are there because they have to fucking go somewhere that’s far away.

        Seriously. A more apt comparison would be white Christian guys near office buildings. White Christian guys have blown up office buildings before, but changes are they’re just at the building to go to work, so it’s ridiculous to be afraid of every white guy you see milling around a building.

    2. As for being sorry, by getting off the plane she cost herself and her family time and money (though got to spend more time in paris) but she didn’t make things worse for the muslim men in question (they might even have gotten more room to spread out on the long flight). So who should she be sorry to?

      To everyone who read her column?

      I mean, look, it’s not cool that she freaked out because she saw two young Arab dudes. But fine, if she doesn’t want to take that flight, that’s her prerogative. She went beyond that, though — she wrote a column all about how her decision was justified, perpetuating the idea that it’s totally reasonable to be scared of Arabs, and encouraging her audience to similarly profile people. That takes it out of the realm of something one person did privately.

  36. “That Rick Sanchez thing really did not seem on the up and up to me. Everyone who runs society’s big institutions do look a lot like Jon Stewart – they’re called white men. ”

    Rick Sanchez is at least as white as Stewart is.

    Astrid: @ Lemur (#1): But of course terrorists can’t be white! You should understand that.

    That depends on who you ask. There are people tracking animal rights extremists, the kind who commit actual criminal acts, not the kind who put up flyers saying “Meat is murder”. The anti-government Sovereign Citizen militia types get a lot of the wrong kind of attention from these same people. McVeigh, ALF et alia have a whole category devoted to them “Domestic Terrorist” and almost everyone in that category is white, because they are terrorist and they are domestic and they happen to be white.

  37. littlem: Because in a kyriarchal, racist system, with multiple tiers, people who look like Beck and O’Reilly and Limbaugh are afforded levels of protection that people with first names like “Juan” and surnames like “Sanchez” are not?  (Quote this comment?)

    Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Beck, et al aren’t fired because they’re not employed by a company that holds their employees to high journalistic standards or demands that their employees not make racist comments on national television. They’re employed by companies that want their employees to get them ratings, and who make racist comments all the time.

    I’m sure NPR would just as quickly fire a white guy for making the same comments Williams made, and I’m sure FOX wouldn’t dream of firing a non-white person for making the same comments.

  39. Although I wonder: Why are Sanchez and Williams losing their jobs, while people like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh still employed?

    Well, the easy answer is that Sanchez and Williams got fired from outfits that retain some semblance of journalistic integrity, though it’s really hard to make that argument when CNN hired Erick “David Souter is a child molester” Erickson and NPR had been allowing Williams to violate his contract left and right (mostly right, since most of the problematic comments were made during his appearances on Fox, where he was identified as an NPR reporter) for years without doing anything about it. Mind you, they hired him knowing that he’d already been reprimanded by the Washington Post for writing a column trashing Anita Hill at a time when Williams had been accused of sexual harassment by about 50 – yes, five-oh – Post employees.

    Maybe Ginni Thomas’s phone call jogged some memory cells over at NPR.

    Beck and O’Reilly are employed by Fox, and Limbaugh owns his own show.

    The more difficult answer is the one littlem pointed out. Though I can’t find it too difficult to feel sorry for Williams (as opposed to Sanchez), since he may have gotten fired from NPR, but he picked up a $2 million contract from Fox as well as a platform to trash the left.

  40. who should she be sorry to?

    Jill:
    To everyone who read her column? I mean, look, it’s not cool that she freaked out because she saw two young Arab dudes. But fine, if she doesn’t want to take that flight, that’s her prerogative. She went beyond that, though — she wrote a column all about how her decision was justified, perpetuating the idea that it’s totally reasonable to be scared of Arabs, and encouraging her audience to similarly profile people.That takes it out of the realm of something one person did privately.  

    I think she’s wrong. Specifically, I think she’s wrong that the information she had about the men indicated that it was probable that they were terrorists:

    Both looked to be about 25 or 26, of Arab descent, beards, dressed in the modern Atta traveling fashion of jeans and t-shirts. Neither had any carry-on bags for an eight-hour flight. One of the men was reading an Arabic newspaper while the other seemed twitchy — he kept looking around, and repeatedly kept pulling out his documents from a small bag to check them over again. I became fixated on them for the next two hours: I had books and magazines but my eyes kept straying to watch what they were up to. After a little bit, both men took to pacing nervously — when they weren’t looking over their documents again. I was trying to think of what purpose they would have to travel to Washington: They were not with family members. They were obviously not businessmen — and yet they were too old to be students. … promptly at three o’clock, the two men went over to a large window, fell to their knees and began elaborately praying to Mecca … Over his shoulder I watched the two men join the boarding queue: they looked actively jumpy by this point.

    Counting t-shirt and jeans as making them more likely to be terrorists because a 9-11 hijacker dressed that way is absurd. That she can’t think of a good reason for them to travel to washington is just an indication of her lack of imagination (they could be americans, foreign graduate students, tourists, people travelling to visit family members, …). Reading arabic, wearing beards, and praying to mecca are all reasonable and non-suspicious things for muslim arabs to do.

    She had very little reason to think they might be terrorists; that is why writing a column claiming that she had sufficient evidence is wrong. Because it makes sense to be on the safe side with things that might well kill you, though, the flight going fine is not enough evidence to say that she made the wrong choice. Which is why the implication of conflict expressed in The original flight had absolutely no problems. But she’d do it again! What? sounds wrong to me. If the author had been in this situation 100 times, each time not boarding the plane and each time nothing going wrong on the plane (which is what I would expect to happen), then we could say “the evidence shows you’re being too quick to assume arab men are terrorists” and express dismay if she continued to claim her actions were justified.

  41. PrettyAmiable: I think you missed the sarcasm.  (Quote this comment?)

    No, I got it, and there’s a lot of truth to the comment, but I just wanted to add something to it.

    Here’s an aspect of the truth of that comment- racial or ethnic profiling WRT to terrorism is not just unjust, it’s also incompetent. If radicalization is the first step to becoming an actual terriost, people who want to play this should see first who actually is getting radicalized. It is not immigrant community Muslims, it is American converts (along with their white compatriots at the same socio-economic level, in another direction). The immigrant communities have some kind of immunity going on this issue for the most part, although the Somalis are having some problems with their young guys. But for the most pasrt, this is a native-born American problem.

    True life example of how stupid it is to profile based on looks: On the frst anniversary of 9/11 a yellow ryder truck pulled up in fornt of the Federal building in Seattle. Two “Middle-eastern looking” young men hopped out and ran across the street. The Federal Protective Service was on that truck and those young men like stink on shit. Indeed they were “Middle-eastern looking”; they were Israeli, and they were looking for the ATM machine acros the street, had no idea that was the Federal Building, the date had slipped their minds, and they had less idea of the significance of a yellow Ryder truck. It turned out they were on Tourist visas and were detained because they were working, as movers (violating their visas) and the Ryder truck was a moving van. Big waste of time and enforcement resources on a couple of illegal aliens/undocumented workers. Oh, and they had parked illegally.

  42. There was talk in the conspiracy community that McVeigh had links to the Phineas Priesthood (yet another subset of Christian Identity), but I didn’t take it too seriously, seemed like a “and another one!!!!” response to Eric Rudolph. Though, that was the first time I’d heard of the Phineas types, wiki says that they aren’t an organization so much as something that various Christian Identity fruitcakes declare themselves to be when they want to feel extra special important.

    That being said, Muslims Wearing Things was my favorite time killer this weekend. Awesomest response-to-someone-in-the-news-is-wrong site I’ve seen in months.

  43. I think it IS relevant that Juan Williams comments were him revealing an interior moment, an unconscious anti-Islam feeling, which he offers as an example of his weakness of thought and then condemns as being irrational.

    I disagree with Jill in the original post where she says Juan Williams is “concerned about Muslims in Muslim garb,” because I don’t think he actually is. He was acknowledging the fact that in this country are so brainwashed by the media/politicians/what have you, that even those with much better judgement can have that instinctive knee-jerk reaction and in the wider context, he was acknowledging it was wrong.

    To say that you understand the emotions and motivations behind prejudice doesn’t mean you are going to allow yourself to be ruled by those emotions.

  45. Who should she be sorry to, Jeff? I’ll be more specific than others here; I would say she damn well owes an apology to the exact two Arab airplane passengers in question. Even if she didn’t succeed, she still tried to get them kicked off the plane. That’s a pretty awful thing to do to someone, I’d say. You’re right, in the end it was her decision to stay for an extra night in Paris and deal with all the extra expense and hassle, but that’s only because the security guard didn’t stoop to her level. If she really had it her way, these guys would have been taken out by security, questioned, searched, subject to humiliation, possibly missing out on whatever thing they were travelling for (family emergency? job opportunity? once-in-a-lifetime tip?), possibly in need of an expensive lawyer within a justice system that might be foreign to them, possibly forced to spend some time in a holding cell.

    Since we’re just speculating on her particular mindset, that’s essentially what she wanted to happen with these guys. So yeah. I’d say she owes them an apology.

  46. Niki: Who should she be sorry to, Jeff? I’ll be more specific than others here; I would say she damn well owes an apology to the exact two Arab airplane passengers in question. Even if she didn’t succeed, she still tried to get them kicked off the plane. That’s a pretty awful thing to do to someone, I’d say. You’re right, in the end it was her decision to stay for an extra night in Paris and deal with all the extra expense and hassle, but that’s only because the security guard didn’t stoop to her level. If she really had it her way, these guys would have been taken out by security, questioned, searched, subject to humiliation, possibly missing out on whatever thing they were travelling for (family emergency? job opportunity? once-in-a-lifetime tip?), possibly in need of an expensive lawyer within a justice system that might be foreign to them, possibly forced to spend some time in a holding cell.Since we’re just speculating on her particular mindset, that’s essentially what she wanted to happen with these guys. So yeah. I’d say she owes them an apology.  (Quote this comment?)

    word.

  47. What Fat Steve said. I think this thread has pretty much run its course, but I still take issue with people willing to jump all over Juan Williams for acknowledging a racist thought he had that he went on to qualify, and to say racial profiling is “incompetent” when WE ALL DO IT. We do it. If not with Muslims, with someone else: maybe white men outside an abortion clinic, maybe Hispanic men or black men or straight cis women. Even if it’s for a split second. And I’m not defending that fact. But to deny that we are influenced by the media and the cultural messages around us is to ignore a powerful force. To other everybody who admits to moments of unconscious racism, to call them ignorant, just comes across as superior and smug in this contex to me. We’re not talking about Glen Beck or any of the other people who literally peddle in this kinds of stereotypes, who encourage them. Juan Williams was acknowledging and evaluating (terribly, not well) his own biases. If you can’t see the difference, I think perhaps you don’t want to.

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