by Arsalan Iftikhar
January 2, 2013
After all of these recent mass shootings around America, I feel really bad for all the young white males who will now be racially profiled.
Said no one ever.
We Americans most recently witnessed yet another mass shooting here in the United States when 20 beautiful children and 6 brave adults were brutally murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut by a 20-year-old gunman named Adam Lanza on December 14, 2012.
Only a few days earlier on December 11, 2012, a heavily-armed gunman wearing a hockey mask opened fire at the Clackamas Town Center shopping mall in suburban Portland, Oregon in the middle of the holiday shopping season, killing two people and wounding a third before taking his own life.
According to Reuters, the shooter was a 22-year-old male named Jacob Tyler Roberts who “appears to have acted alone in a random rampage”, according to a Reuters report on the shooting rampage.
Finally, a few months earlier, a masked gunman (24-year-old graduate student James Holmes) walked into a Century 16 multiplex movie theater in Aurora, Colorado for a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises movie andmercilessly murdered 12 people (and injuring 58 others) before being taken into custody by police authorities.
Aside from semi-automatic weapons, what is the one thing that all of these mass killers have in common?
They are all young white males.
(Left to Right) Portland shooter Jacob Tyler Roberts, Colorado shooter James Holmes and Connecticut shooter Adam Lanza
Can you imagine if all of these shooters were young Arab Muslim (or Black or Latino) males, do you think our American media would be focusing solely on ‘mental health’ issues?
Do you really think that right-wing conservative commentators would be blaming violent video games and rap music as the cause of these tragic mass shootings?
Nope. Let’s be honest, we would be talking about racial profiling.
As I wrote in a January 2012 CNN column, the concept of “racial profiling” has undermined important terrorist investigations here in the United States many times. Most notably, this includes the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing in which the two white male domestic terrorists- Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols– were able to flee while law enforcement operated on the (wrong) theory that the act had been committed by “Arab terrorists” for the first 48 hours of the investigation.
Similarly, according to an August 2009 report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Rights Working Group to the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination: “Both Democratic and Republican administrations [in the United States] have acknowledged that racial profiling is unconstitutional, socially corrupting and counter-productive, yet this unjustifiable practice remains a stain on American democracy and an affront to the promise of racial equality.”
But that has never stopped prominent Americans from calling for “racial profiling” in the past when the criminals happened to brown-skinned men with foreign-sounding names.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks on our country, we began to see a maelstrom of right-wing politicians and commentators begin to publicly call for the racial profiling of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men in the days, weeks, months and years since that time.
Many of these news stories below dealing with racial profiling of Arab, Muslim and South Asian men can be found in my book and are excerpted below:
- Six days after 9/11, in a radio interview on September 17, 2001, when asked about the concept of ‘racial profiling’ of Arabs and Muslims, then-Republican congressman John Cooksey (R-LA) from Louisiana admitted that, “If I see someone that comes in that has a diaper on his head and a fan belt wrapped around the diaper on his head, that guy needs to be pulled over.” Actor Wil Wheaton, best known for his roles in Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation, summed up many Americans sentiments perfectly when he wrote in a public letter:
“Holy crap! A United States Representative actually said that…”
- Another Republican congressman made news during a November 19, 2001 meeting with emergency responders in Valdosta, Georgia on the topic of racial profiling. The Associated Press (AP) reported that then-Republican Congressman Saxby Chambliss from the 8th congressional district of Georgia remarked that they should “turn the sheriff loose and arrest every Muslim that crosses the state line.” Even more frightening than the sheer nuttiness of his statements was the fact that Saxby Chambliss was also then-chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security at the time he made these blatantly racist (and patently stupid) remarks.
Bizarrely, instead of voting him out of office, on November 5, 2002, the people of great state of Georgia decide to elect Saxby Chambliss to become their next United States senator.
- Only a month after the 9/11 attacks, infamous right-wing commentator Ann Coulter suggested that there should be a “mass deportation” of Muslims from America.
In April 2004, our American ‘queen of intolerance’ would soon take her xenophobic crown to new heights into the legal arena of racial profiling. In one of her nationally syndicated columns, she brilliantly decided that this was her opportunity to offer marketing slogans to airlines in regards to the racial profiling of its American Muslim and Arab passengers. Our jingoiste extraordinaire proudly pitched these as possible post-9/11 airline “slogans the airlines could use” for their Arab and Muslim customers:
- “Now Frisking All Arabs — Twice!”
- “More Civil-Rights Lawsuits Brought by Arabs Than Any Other Airline!”
- “The Friendly Skies — Unless You’re an Arab…”
- “You Are Now Free to Move About the Cabin — Not So Fast, Mohammed!”
Her next Islamophobic swipe regarding racial profiling occurred in November 2006 when she wrote that racially“profiling Muslims is more like profiling the [Ku Klux] Klan…”
Finally, in front of hundreds of adoring fans at the 2006 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Ann Coulter once told people that our post-9/11 American motto should be:
“Raghead talks tough…Raghead faces consequences.”
Getting back to the recent mass shootings around America, even legendary CBS News anchor Bob Schieffer oncerecently said during an episode of Face the Nation:
“If the Sandy Hook [elementary school] shooter had an Arab name…People would be going nuts…”
True story, Bob.
Because like I said at the beginning, after all of these recent mass shootings around America, I feel really bad for all the young white males who will now be racially profiled.
Said no one ever.
Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and author of the book Islamic Pacifism: Global Muslims in the Post-Osama Era.
