The American Spectator

What’s going on here is an open attempt to prevent free and open debate on an issue of national security. It is a concerted effort by CAIR and its ilk to prevent people such as we from discussing openly what even the terminally politically correct Brits are beginning to do and what the Israelis have been doing for decades: airline passenger profiling. The CAIRheads are throwing the charge of racism at people who are demonstrably not racist in order to intimidate them out of talking about profiling. Everyone who has an interest in the First Amendment should be outraged and responding by joining in this debate.

Islamic fascism is an entirely proper term to describe the Iranian regime, Syria’s Assad, Hizballah, al Qaeda, and all the rest. Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.” For all the talk about the peaceful Islamic “ummah,” that definition fits, with precision, the terrorist nations and the terrorist organizations they fund, arm, and man. Those are facts, not racism. Racism is, as Churchill said, to be despised. He asked, “How can any man help how he is born?” Ah, though men cannot choose how they are born, they can choose how they behave toward others. And to say that it is a violation of civil rights to screen Muslim males more closely than others at airports is dead wrong, both logically and legally.

No one is ever going to mistake Hooper for Martin Luther King, Jr. or CAIR for the NAACP. And no one who knows a scintilla of Constitutional law will mistake increased screening of Muslim males at airports with racism. The case law — for decades, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education — prohibits “invidious” discrimination: it classifies people into different groups in which group members receive distinct and typically unequal treatments and rights without rational justification. It is not only rational but proven by more than a decade of terrorist attacks that increased screening of Muslim males at airports is necessary to the safety of other airline passengers. It has nothing to do with invidious discrimination and is not prohibited by our Constitution or the many Supreme Court cases that interpret it.

If Yves Leterme had said about Belgian Muslims what he said about the Francophones, his life would be in danger. To accuse those who advocate terrorist profiling of racism is an attempt to limit our freedoms of speech and the press. It is, in short, fascistic.

TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004) and, with Edward Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United States (Regnery, May 2006 — click here to obtain a free chapter).