Racial Profiling

In God We Trust

RACIAL PROFILING

By Maj. Gen. Jerry R. Curry (ret'd)
CurryforAmerica.com

I can see it on the big screen now. The movie opens with a gorgeous panoramic view of the western plains. In the foreground is a wagon train of settlers migrating west. In the middle distance is a lone rider furiously galloping toward the wagon train, shouting and waving.

Pulling up alongside the wagon master his horse’s hoofs kicking up clouds of dust, the rider points and shouts, “There are hostile Indians just over the ridge.” The wagon master warns, “Be careful how you talk when they get here, we don’t want to offend them.” The scene closes with the wagon master asking with his last breath just as one of my Native American ancestors drills him right between the eyes with a tomahawk, “We didn’t offend them … did we?”

The U.S. military’s report on the Fort Hood killings has been released and nowhere in 86 pages is there a mention that Major Hasan is a Muslim. This is particularly chilling because it was adherence to the Muslim faith, as he interpreted it, that caused him to go on this killing spree.

For the past twenty-five years equal opportunity Muslim terrorists have wantonly attacked and killed American military and civilians around the world without regard to sex, age or occupation. There were many signs that pointed to Hasan’s being a potential terrorist killer, for those willing to see them. He was known to speak out against the U.S. military’s fighting in Muslim countries, to show sympathy toward Muslim terrorists and to pass out business cards that declared him to be a “Soldier of Allah.”

Yet none of this is mentioned in the military report for fear that some Muslim or Muslim organization might take offense. Hasan is the invisible elephant in the tent who gets a free pass. Those who chose to ignore the signs of his Muslim radicalism are as guilty and complicit as he in the killings.

Protecting American lives and interests is what the Department of Defense was created to do. But evidently it’s forgotten how to discharge those duties. Too many of our current military leaders are like the wagon master, who cannot identify an enemy when they see one and, if they do, refuse to come to grips with the reality.

It is like the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) which is responsible for safeguarding our airports, airliners and air transportation systems. At the airport security portal, the TSA searches and pats down 80-year-old grandmothers from Omaha, yet hesitates to segregate and question 25 year old Muslims. The truth is that it is radical young Muslims who wantonly kill our citizens; grandmothers from Omaha do not. The TSA is afraid to take the proper actions necessary to safeguard American lives for fear they might be accused of racial profiling, or they might offend Muslims in the United States.

Vague accusations of racial profiling are a holdover from the pre-civil rights days when blacks were segregated and treated as sub-human beings. I’m old enough to have lived through the racial profiling period of American history. It was humiliating, mean and ugly, but black people like me didn’t crash airliners into World Trade Centers.

Recently I was involved in an intense conversation where the other party verbally assaulted me with what he supposed was a conversation stopper. “What you just said deeply offended me!” he snarled. “Then be offended,” I shot back.

There is a time to be politically correct and a time to kick butt and take names. You shouldn’t be a supervisor in the TSA if you can’t figure out the difference between the two. That is, if you’re confused about which is which, you shouldn’t be assigned to protect the lives of Americans passing through our airports and flying on our airliners.

TSA should zero in like a laser beam on anyone coming through an airport security station that looks like, or the inspectors have reason to believe might be a radical Muslim terrorist. Such people should get the full “terrorist search” treatment; while the grandmother from Omaha should get a pass. As my steel worker father liked to say, “It’s hard, but it’s fair.”