Cohen: Racial profiling unacceptable

Column photo

By Ben Cohen

Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Tragedy is strategy. In high school, when I was merely a left-leaning blabber (ranks aren’t really good until they alliterate), I used this slightly clever line in a song I entered in a newspaper contest to criticize President George W. Bush. Sadly, I’ve been seeing it play out quite a lot recently.

Two weeks ago, a military psychiatrist named Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan opened fire on Fort Hood, the base he was stationed at in Texas. Several people were killed or wounded, and the nation was left shaking its head, wondering what had happened.

Sadly, the inevitable happened shortly after. People took a quick look at the shooter, heard his name and decided immediately that he was an Islamic terrorist looking to bring down the Great Satan from within. There was no consideration for the fact that he was an accomplished military doctor and held the rank of major. No attempt to look at his background, beyond his religion, and see if there had been some personal factor that caused him to snap, as tends to happen with the people who make the decision to commit such heinous acts.

A few days after the shooting, I was in New York City for an event sponsored by the Jewish organization Chabad. There I got to listen to a speaker named Molly Resnick, an Israeli journalist who spent time working for NBC. At some point, she brought up the shooting, and began spouting off on how it would have been avoided if the military had just racially profiled Hasan a little bit more.

Apparently he occasionally gave people on the base Qurans. This is a terrible controversy, as no member of the armed forces has ever been exposed to a religion, ever. And he had looked at radical Islamic Web sites at some point, which nobody in the military, let alone somebody with a background in the study of somebody’s mental state, ever does. If you add these things up with the fact that he is a Muslim, that means they should have known he was a terrorist all along.

That’s right, a bloody rampage was actually a victory for racial profiling. It was also an opportunity for Rush Limbaugh to claim that Hasan was an adviser to President Barack Obama during his campaign, but he never explained where that came from. Also, I’m convinced that Limbaugh’s program is actually an elaborate piece of performance art, but I digress.

The attitude that being just a little more bigoted can prevent acts of violence has been problematic in our society for years. Racial profiling has been one of the most egregious problems with law enforcement for as long as I can remember, and even when laws are passed to try and cut back on it, it never seems to disappear completely.

Hasan is a monster for what he did, sure enough. He is a murderer and should be punished for his actions. That’s the thing, though. They are his actions, and no one else’s. That he was a Muslim, or a member of any minority group for that matter, should not be seen as relevant to the shooting until it has been thoroughly investigated and proven to be a factor. Anything else is a knee-jerk reaction, and a regressive one at that.

— Cohen is a Topeka senior in political science

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Comments

JConnor (anonymous) says...

Ben, I was going to call this piece of drivel moronic until I realized what brilliant satire it is. Props to you for calling out those in our society who are overly PC and allow situations like this to happen in the first place. Bravo!

November 18, 2009 at 1:22 a.m. ( | suggest removal )

JConnor (anonymous) says...

From CS-Monitor:

"National Public Radio has reported that Walter Reed officials did not take action against Hasan because they feared a backlash for targeting a Muslim"

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1118/p0...

And here is that NPR piece with some more good info:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...

"Second, some of Hasan's supervisors and instructors had told colleagues that they repeatedly bent over backward to support and encourage him, because they didn't have clear evidence that he was unstable, and they worried they might be "discriminating" against Hasan because of his seemingly extremist Islamic beliefs."

Well I sure am glad no one hurt Hasan's feelings. That would have been just awful. So what if he had tried to contact Al-Qaeda? So what if supervisors at Walter Reed reprimanded him for espousing extremist Islamic views?

November 18, 2009 at 1:41 a.m. ( | suggest removal )

connerm (anonymous) says...

This is crap, Ben. Tell more than just the details that support your point of view.

November 18, 2009 at 1:30 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

timeeeee (anonymous) says...

maybe not the best example but thank you for this article. i'm sick and tired of hearing people talk about islam as if they're scared of it. too many allow themselves to come to conclusions about people based on their name, race, nationality, or religion, because of the actions of extreme radicals who happen to (unfortunately) share some of these traits. some people call islam the "religion of peace," which may sound absurd, but that is what it means to them. don't judge islam based on islamic terrorism, and i won't judge christianity based on anti-abortion fire-bombings and murders. do we have a deal, everyone?

November 19, 2009 at 12:12 a.m. ( | suggest removal )

me (anonymous) says...

I wonder which is worse: people who saw this tragedy and immediately assumed it was terrorism because the gunman has an Arab name or people who continue to deny any link between this act of terrorism and militant Islam and label any inconvenient facts as "racial profiling."

Congratulations to Ben for not letting the facts, common sense, or journalistic integrity get in the way of his world view.

November 19, 2009 at 11:55 a.m. ( | suggest removal )

Dan (anonymous) says...

So I most certainly agree that because the gunman was a muslim and of arabic background there was a great deal of racial profiling.

Did anyone call it an act of terrorism when the gunman at Virginia Tech killed so many people? Not that I recall. I would say it was very likely not called an act of terrorism because the gunman wasn't muslim. Hmmm.

Yet here is this guy shooting up people, just like others before him, and he's a terrorist. Does he claim affiliation to any terrorist group? Better yet, does any terrorist group claim affiliation with him? I'm willing to say that this was an event just like the others where an individual was unable to find the correct mental and physical stabilization and just snapped.

November 19, 2009 at 12:21 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

connerm (anonymous) says...

Dan: The FBI had been investigating him for 2 years for having contact with Al Qaeda-affiliated individuals on the watch list. He also gave a presentation sympathizing with suicide bombers at the Army War College, claimed himself a soldier of Islam first and of America second, shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as he began shooting, and was creeping out many of his colleagues for years.

This lends credence to the theory that perhaps he was working with an Islamic militant organization (i.e. terrorists) and that this could have been a more or less planned attack. However, Congress and the Army are both leading investigations to discern whether or not this is the case and have asked people not to jump to conclusions.

Clearly this individual did not have the correct mental and physical stabilization, but it is also possible that he was working with Islamist organizations. It is important that we discern the truth because we do not want this incident to repeat itself.

November 19, 2009 at 2:30 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

RTBatKU (anonymous) says...

Mr. Conner - well put.

November 19, 2009 at 4:53 p.m. ( | suggest removal )

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