This Worries Me

Tis was posted this morning on Salon.com by Juan Cole:

The U.S. Justice Department is considering a change in the grounds on which the FBI can investigate citizens and legal residents of the United States. Till now, DOJ guidelines have required the FBI to have some evidence of wrongdoing before it opens an investigation. The impending new rules, which would be implemented later this summer, allow bureau agents to establish a terrorist profile or pattern of behavior and attributes and, on the basis of that profile, start investigating an individual or group. Agents would be permitted to ask "open-ended questions" concerning the activities of Muslim Americans and Arab-Americans. A person's travel and occupation, as well as race or ethnicity, could be grounds for opening a national security investigation.

Fear, worry, nervousness all increase as I read this. Not as some paranoid left-over 60s radical (although there may be some of that) but also as a student of history which isn't all that long past.

First there is World War II and the Japanese Internment Camps. Just because they were of Japanese descent they were deemed dangerous to national security or whatever the words might have been. It didn't matter that they were Japanese-Americans. Can it happen again? Probably not to that extent, but it may already have been happening in ways that the mainstream media cannot even see.

Second, there is the centuries long history of anti-Semitism. No, the concentration camps didn't happen here. (Other than above, of course.) But we have an ethno-religious group that has regularly been "profiled" throughout history. It didn't always mean a yellow star pinned to their coat, but it was there.

Such generalized profiling is dangerous. It is stereotyping when a whole group of individuals is separated out, singled out for extra scrutiny just because they are of a particular group. In that thinking all people may be created equal, but some are just more dangerous to our way of life.

If this happens we will lose some more of the benefits of being a country filled with diversity. We will take a step even further backward than the constitutional tampering that has gone on. We will be disturbing one of the basic principles that we claim our country is founded on- diversity and opportuninty.