http://tiny.cc/nopants

my comment pointing to the fact that “fair and lovely” for an indian (light brown) is a typical “dark arab terrorist” color for populations which really are fair and lovely :=)

isn’t in the lighter skinned ‘swarthy’ north indians who would be most subject to racial profiling? in contrast, very dark skinned south asians look more like blacks than arabs.

anyway, the biggest issue seems to be sikhs, not muslims. pointing to the importance of dress. my parents are practicing brown muslims but they don’t “dress muslim,” and have admitted to their bangladeshi relatives that it was really their sikh acquaintances who got the most crap after 9/11.

Either way, the overall professionalism shown by some personnel from certain agencies is lacking. None of the “new” measures the various countries or airlines are instituting will have any real measurable impact on preventing attacks other than simply making life harder for the regular folks brown or otherwise. Dude’s father tells the government his son is up to no good, yet that somehow gets lost in bureaucratic bullshit.

Here’s how the Israel’s set-up is… Either way, if anyone is pro/con Israel, I hope they leave it out of the thread. The reason I referenced this article is to point out we still haven’t reached a point where we’ve trained the system to look for behavioural clues and addressed logistics at airports to ensure risk to any other soft target at airports (like screening areas) is minimised.

Consider the analogy: While the Indians are busy screening the Arabs and UK whites, hundreds of nonwhite Americans can tapdance their way through customs wearing their Strictly 4 my NAMBLAz t-shirts.

Sure, but that is a different point — it is an observation about the screen, and what it can catch.

I was talking about what browns/whites should do, given a screen that catches them a lot, as it tries to isolate some weirdos who happen to be mostly brown/white. All the browns/whites getting together and making a big noise is not the answer, as it will only create/reinforce the stereotype of all browns/whites being weirdos. It is a counterproductive proposal.

You can talk about more optimised screens, for instance there is a lot of talk now about the way Israel interviews passengers quickly, and how they haven’t had any issues all these years, even though they are targeted more than the US. But that is a wider discussion, and not strictly a Desi one. Of course, if they have a better and focused screen, it would help Desis more than others. So maybe we should think of how we could help make the screen settle on just the weirdos, and ignore others. Instead of exhortations to rise up and signal the white house.

Mr. X, everybody knows only whites wear NAMBLA T-shirts.