-Caveat Lector- http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/editorials/story.asp?id=E48EB4CF-DF1D-4414-BB88-756E1104FC2B
Americans imposing racist agenda JANET BAGNALL The Gazette Friday, November 08, 2002 The United States is hell-bent on treating as a potential terrorist anyone who is Muslim or Arab or, failing that, dark-skinned enough to pass for one. And Canadians are being asked to go along with it. Never mind that John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban," is a white American or that Richard Reid, the British shoe-bomber, was insufficiently swarthy to attract airport security attention. Or that the men involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks had all entered the United States from countries other than Canada. American security forces are sticking by their decision that every Canadian born in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Yemen or Sudan must be fingerprinted and photographed if he or she travel to the U.S. For reasons that remain unfathomable, Foreign Affairs Minister Bill Graham has thrown in the towel and withdrawn a travel advisory for Canadians born in those countries. The danger of being born in one of these countries was made amply clear last month when Canadian engineer and Ottawa resident Arar Maher vanished from a New York airport while waiting for his connecting flight home to Canada. The U.S, totally unrepentant, finally admitted deporting him to Syria, the birthplace he had last seen at age 17. Maher might never see Canada again because the U.S. has decided it can unilaterally determine the fate of any individual on its territory, regardless of international laws. Canadian author Rohinton Mistry was luckier. He was not born in one of the countries on the original list of terrorist hotbeds, and he is not Muslim, so he was not arrested. He was, on the other hand, subjected to such harassment while traveling on a book tour in the United States that he canceled the second half of the tour. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize earlier this year, the India-born Mistry said, "The first flight we took, my wife and I, we were greeted by a ticket agent who cheerfully told us that we had been selected randomly for a special security check. "Then it began to happen at every single stop, at every single airport. The random process took on a 100-per-cent certitude." Since it was only this week that American security forces added to their list of terrorism suspects anyone born in Pakistan, India, South Africa, Jamaica and a dozen other Commonwealth countries, Mistry's place of birth was not the reason for him to be stopped. U.S. security forces waved him over for special treatment because he has a beard and is dark-skinned. That means that it will do no good not to include a person's place of birth on his or her Canadian passport. You can't hide the colour of your skin. Canadians have always felt like they exist at a safe distance from the racism that still pervades U.S. life. Not any more. People whose business requires that they travel to the U.S. have to go. I'm not sure the rest of us need to give our tourist or consumer dollars to a country prepared to trample over the civil rights of our countrymen. Americans have the right to secure their borders. They do not have the right to impose a racist agenda on the rest of the world. The thing with racial profiling is you can only stop once you've turfed every single member of the profiled group out of the country or into a camp, much like what happened to the Japanese during World War II in the U.S. and Canada. We were supposed to have learned something from that miscarriage of justice. The other problem with racial profiling is that it's ridiculous. It achieves nothing. Twenty per cent of the world's population is Muslim. What are the Americans going to do? Set up files on billion individuals and then persecute any of them who dares set foot on Americian soil? And we're supposed to go along with this? I don't think so. [EMAIL PROTECTED] © Copyright 2002 Montreal Gazette http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/editorials/story.asp?id=E48EB4CF-DF1D-4414-BB88-756E1104FC2B <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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