I feel the need to preface this with a brief story about a good friend of mine.  This friend is from Jordan; his family immigrated here (legally) when he was 6.  He has two beautiful children by his white, American wife.  He himself is an electrical engineer for an American company.  He and his family are practicing Catholics.  They are intelligent, kind, upstanding American citizens.

Unfortunately, they all bear his last name.  He and his children have olive skin.  After 9/11, his wife, a school teacher, received death threats from parents because of her "Muslim-sounding" last name; several parents tried to demand that the school system remove their kids from that "terrorist-loving classroom."  Someone leaked their personal number to the community - a very small town in rural Nevada.  They received threats on their answering machine for weeks before finally breaking down and having their number changed.  Time passed, and eventually, everyone in town forgot that they had treated this family like shit for months because they might be Muslim.  The family forgot.  Everyone moved on.

Common sense probably would have told everyone in town that these people were in their church every Sunday.  One of the parents who asked to have his kids removed from the wife's class had, in fact, been at the youngest son's baptism.  These were members of a community, and after 9/11, they were turned against because of stupid stereotypes and a lack of common sense.

An entire community turned against these people. 

This lack of basic good sense doesn't just apply to scared men and women who think they're doing what's best for their community.  Sadly, it applies to some of the very agencies that are meant to keep us safe.  Instead, they let people with explosive-laced underwear get through security, but ensure that small children are patted down and treated like potential criminals:

“Meet Mikey Hicks,” said Najlah Feanny Hicks, introducing her 8-year-old son, a New Jersey Cub Scout and frequent traveler who has seldom boarded a plane without a hassle because he shares the name of a suspicious person. “It’s not a myth.”

Michael Winston Hicks’s mother initially sensed trouble when he was a baby and she could not get a seat for him on their flight to Florida at an airport kiosk; airline officials explained that his name “was on the list,” she recalled.

The first time he was patted down, at Newark Liberty International Airport, Mikey was 2. He cried.

After years of long delays and waits for supervisors at every airport ticket counter, this year’s vacation to the Bahamas badly shook up the family. Mikey was frisked on the way there, then more aggressively on the way home.

“Up your arms, down your arms, up your crotch — someone is patting your 8-year-old down like he’s a criminal,” Mrs. Hicks recounted. “A terrorist can blow his underwear up and they don’t catch him. But my 8-year-old can’t walk through security without being frisked.”

It is true that Mikey is not on the federal government’s “no-fly” list, which includes about 2,500 people, less than 10 percent of them from the United States. But his name appears to be among some 13,500 on the larger “selectee” list, which sets off a high level of security screening.

At some point, someone named Michael Hicks made the Department of Homeland Security suspicious, and little Mikey is still paying the price. (His father, also named Michael Hicks, was stopped for the first time on the Bahamas trip.)

Both lists are maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, which includes the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They are given to the Transportation Security Administration, which in turn sends them to the airlines.

[...]

Certainly, Mikey’s date of birth, less than a month before 9/11, should prevent him from being mistaken as a terrorist.

A third grader at a parochial school in Clifton, N.J., Mikey recites the drill like the world-weary traveler he is. Leave early for the airport, always with his passport. Try to get a boarding pass at the counter. This will send up a flag. The ticket agent, peering down at tiny bespectacled Mikey, will apologize or roll her eyes, and call for a supervisor. The supervisor, after a phone call — or, more likely, a series of phone calls — will ultimately finagle him onto the plane. But the Hickses are typically the last to select seats and the last to board, which means they sometimes can’t sit together.

Mrs. Hicks, a photojournalist who herself got Secret Service clearance to travel aboard Air Force II with then-Vice President Al Gore, anticipated additional chaos following the attempted underwear bombing. Before leaving for the Bahamas on Jan. 2, she reached out to Congressman Pascrell’s office, which then enlisted a T.S.A. agent to meet the family at the airport. Even this did not prevent Mikey from an extra pat-down.

On the way home last Friday, Mikey’s boarding pass showed four giant red S’s at the airport in Nassau. “Oh, random screening,” Mrs. Hicks said. Mikey asked his mother not to worry and said he would use his tae kwon do — he has a junior black belt — if needed. Mrs. Hicks said she wanted to take pictures of her son being frisked but was told it was against the rules.

If only someone would apply some common sense, maybe - just maybe - we'd have a lot fewer frustrated citizens and a lot more terrorists under arrest.

But, then again, we're just going to read them their Miranda rights and give them a lawyer, so, at the end of the day - what's the point?

Posted by: Ember at 09:47 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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