A man who has been working in the area said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.Neighbors saw suspicious activity at the home of the man who killed fourteen people yesterday, but were reluctant to report it for fear they'd be branded as racists. Profiling is among the more serious offenses listed on the liberal Index of forbidden activities, of course, and few citizens wish to run afoul of social media inquisitors who can make one's life a living hell were the citizen to transgress politically correct orthodoxy.
A Muslim boy makes a clock that looks for all the world like a suitcase bomb. He takes it to school, his teachers are alarmed, the boy is suspended, and social media, and even the president, no less, excoriate the school for "profiling" the boy because he was a Muslim.
A female resident in a mostly white, upscale neighborhood sees a black man trying to break into a home and alerts the police. It turns out that the man is a prominent university professor who has locked himself out of his own house, but liberals in the media criticizes the woman for "profiling."
We must not profile. It's bad. So despite the fact that most terrorists who seek to bomb airplanes are Middle Eastern Muslim males between the ages of 18 and 40, TSO agents, if they're going to cast a suspicious eye at passengers who fit this description, must also frisk elderly women in wheelchairs to prove that they're not discriminating against anyone.
We've been snookered into abandoning common sense and playing a grand game of "Let's Pretend." We have to pretend that there's no correlation whatsoever between certain kinds of criminal activity and certain demographic identities. Everyone knows there is, of course, but we must pretend there isn't, and as soon as someone points out the obvious correlation, interest groups like CAIR (Council of American Islamic Relations) shriek and howl until social media pounces on the hapless offender and pillories him for his insensitivity and bigotry.
We're told that "If we see something say something," but people are justifiably fearful that if they do say something they'll be the next media whipping boy so, like the man in the news story above, they conclude it's safer to say nothing than to offend the thought police. Consequently, fourteen people are dead today, sacrificed on the altar of political correctness.
Of course, we want to be careful not to give the impression that all Muslims are terrorists so one might appreciate caution in this regard were it not so hypocritical. It'd be easier to accept the reluctance to sound like one is critical of all Muslims, notwithstanding that a sizable minority of them are behaving barbarically, if it weren't for the suspicion that were a small coterie of Tea Partiers shooting up Christmas gatherings full of innocent people liberals would have no reservations whatsoever about condemning the entire movement.
Profiling is okay, you see, as long as the people being profiled are members of a group liberals despise.