Recently Donald J. Trump, the man who says that Mexico is sending over their rapists (despite conclusive data that immigrants are vastly more law abiding than 1st or 2nd Generation Americans (http://www.vox.com/2015/7/9/8922783/immigrants-crime-donald-trump) opined that this nation should seriously consider profiling of Muslims to protect innocent lives (http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/06/trump-us-should-consider-profiling-muslims.html).
He has argued we should ban all travel of Muslims to this country until “we know what’s going on” and has even hinted at not only deporting 11 million “undocumented immigrants” but to deport Muslims too.
Let me reiterate, Trump wants to ban all Muslim travel until “we know what’s going on.” The problem with that statement is that it’s clear, it’s only Trump and his gullible and likely bigoted followers who don’t know what’s going on. If they did know, they wouldn’t support such a pathetic racist and bigoted proposal to protect lives in this country.
Well, let me clarify, if they knew “what’s going on” then perhaps they would support profiling. However not Muslims but rather White Males because the data doesn’t justify the threat Donald Trump and his minions claim.
Violence, crime, terrorism isn’t anything new in this country. It’s existed long before the founders ever met in Philadelphia and will go on long after Trump Tower is razed to make room for a national Mosque (as an apology to the 1.7 Billion Muslims maliciously libeled by the likes of Trump, the GOP and Bill Maher). In fact, violence, crime and terrorism has existed as long as the human race has existed and is world-wide.
Now from a historical perspective, those in power often point to a group to be afraid of regardless of the actual reality, relying more on anecdotal tales lacking statistical data to give the people somebody to be afraid of whether the data backed it up or not. It’s interesting to note that in 1915 before the United States entered The Great War in Europe, we were neutral. We were also supplying munitions to England and France who were fighting the Germans. At the time (and now) we had a significant German Population.
Well the country started fearing and hating those of German descent for many reasons, mostly because of exploitation in the Papers of the Time. When the Lusitania was torpedoed and sank on May 7, 1915; 114 Americans were killed. Further, German saboteurs were caught here. There was an angry outcry against Germans in this Country. Many changed their names so as to not sound so German.
In fact had President Woodrow Wilson followed the proposals offered today by Donald Trump towards the Muslims, against the Germans of that time, a certain German Immigrant, who had been expelled from Germany in 1905 by the name of Freiderich Trumpf may have been expelled from here to. Herr Trumpf in 1917 changed his surname to Trump and is the Grandfather of Donald J. Trump.
Were all German immigrants and descendants criminals, rapists, saboteurs, traitors as the papers of the time would have Americans believe? Of course not. The same is true about the Japanese, Italians and Germans in the country during World War II. The same is true today about Latinos and Muslims in this country. Trump ignores actual data and prefer to judge based on “stories” and anecdotal evidence from the “internet.” So who should we profile if we’re going to base it on actual data about who is behind violent crime in this nation more than of any segment of the population? Well, that would be White Conservative Native Born Americans.
As Van Jones pointed out recently, Americans are seven times more likely to be killed by a right-wing extremist than a Muslim. (http://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/van-jones-turns-trumps-mass-shooting-policy-on-its-head-start-racially-profiling-white-men/)
His assertion is based on actual data collected and analyze by Charles Kurzman and David Schanzer who gathered data from the Police Executive Research Forum, the United States Military Academy and Global Terrorism Data Base, among others. The data showed
“of 382 law enforcement agencies, 74 percent reported anti-government extremism as one of the top three terrorist threats in their jurisdiction; 39 percent listed extremism connected with Al Qaeda or like-minded terrorist organizations. And only 3 percent identified the threat from Muslim extremists as severe, compared with 7 percent for anti-government and other forms of extremism”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/16/opinion/the-other-terror-threat.html
The fact of the matter is right-wing militias; people like the Oath Keepers, Sovereign Citizen, KKK, groups who claim a Christian heritage, call out for anti-government actions against not only Federal Officials, but State and local police. They have threatened and carried out attacks on police officers, judges, government officials, people of color, and people of faith not their own, abortion clinics, churches, The Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, etc.
These weren’t Latinos, they weren’t Black, they weren’t Asian, they weren’t Muslim; they were White Americans with an anger only satisfied by violence and death. And these attacks far outnumber the attacks in this nation by 7 times all other groups combined. Further, this is considered a “conservative” number (no pun intended but I’ll take it).
It’s interesting to note last year that the TSA failed to intercept weapons as part of a test 95% of the time. I submit that the reason the failure was so high was that the subjects used in the tests were White Americans. TSA failed to profile the right group. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/01/tsa-fails-95-percent-tests-homeland-security_n_7485558.html
If we, as Trump and his supporters demand, are going to have law enforcement profile potential offenders, then based on the data it has to be Caucasian Males. They’re more of a threat here and now than any other group.
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