Allowing irrational responses guided by racist ideas to mold our response to 9/11 and to guide our actions in the war on terror has also led to serious domestic policy disasters, Ibish said. These types of responses fueled calls for racial profiling and other serious abuses of civil rights and liberties.
Ibish pointed out that legislative responses such as the USA PATRIOT Act and secretive programs like spying on people in the US without warrants are serious violations of the Constitution. But they aren't the main way civil rights and liberties have been abused in the US.
Immigration policy crafted within the racist anti-Arab and Muslim mindset that fueled the Bush administration's response to 9/11 has fostered the worst abuses. "The immigrant community," Ibish said, "has borne the brunt of civil liberties abuses."
The alien registration push following the September 11th attacks, for example, a drive to bring thousands of Arab and Muslim people, particularly young men, into close contact with federal law enforcement officials, "had truly zero effect in terms of counter-terrorism," Ibish stated.
According to him, federal authorities detained about 5,000 Arab and Muslim people, mostly men. Almost all of these cases were for minor immigration violations that would have been easily handled before 9/11, but since, turned into long periods of isolated detention with little or no access to a legal process and often ending in deportation. None of these cases dredged up any "real terrorists."
This mass round up did, however, "certainly express the idea that Arabs and Muslims are by definition potentially dangerous and of interest to the authorities," he added.
Racial and religious profiling of Arab and Muslim people as potential terrorists has been an unmitigated failure, Ibish said. Still, right-wing pundits continue to push for it. Why should we be concerned about an 80-year old white grandmother in an airport security line, they say, when "the real terrorists" are probably Middle Eastern, Muslim, and so on?
According to Ibish, the problem with racial profiling, aside from that fact that it is literally impossible to do when dealing with the many language groups and nationalities that compose the Arab and Muslim world, is that it signals to potential criminals who law enforcement officials are looking for and provides them with a means of changing their appearance to no longer fit the profile. "Why tell the potential terrorist what you are looking for," Ibish asked.
For this reason, truly random searches in airport security lines, for example, have a better deterrent effect than profiling, which, he said, has been shown to be "worse than useless."
In fact, in 1999 the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that it used a computer system in airport security lines to profile Arab and Muslim men as potential threats. Its failure to stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11, however, was a serious blow to proving its effectiveness, Ibish said.
Now, since airports and the federal transportation security officials have gotten serious about security, racial profiling has become much more difficult to detect. Officials who are serious about security understand that racial profiling is an ineffective security measure.
The right-wing's demand for racial profiling is meant to use race and religion to lump Arab and Muslim into a category of people who are likely or potential enemies, but it shows how detrimental racist thinking can be to real security, Ibish concluded.
Will the real terrorists please stand up?
If the "real terrorists" aren't among the Arab and Muslim population in the US, and they aren't in the Saddam Hussein regime, who are they? Who was behind the 9/11 attacks? What is this religious movement that appears to be behind so much violence in the Middle East?
In a post-lecture interview, Ibish held that Al Qaeda and "like-minded" people are part of a complex supra-national Islamic movement (even this is a bit confused, he saexplained, as some within this movement have nationalist tendencies) that, once on the fringes on Muslim society and detested by most Arab and Muslim people, have seen their fortunes improve primarily not because it is natural or instinctive for Muslim and Arab peoples to hate the "West," but because of Western policies toward the Middle East and the response by the Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks.
Ibish described this movement as the Salafist-Jihadist movement. It is a specific religious ideological outlook that favors violence against people and groups it declares to be apostates, even other Salafists. For the most part, it envisions a Muslim world without borders and for this reason has aimed much violence at Arab and Muslim peoples and governments.
Ibish pointed out that legislative responses such as the USA PATRIOT Act and secretive programs like spying on people in the US without warrants are serious violations of the Constitution. But they aren't the main way civil rights and liberties have been abused in the US.
Immigration policy crafted within the racist anti-Arab and Muslim mindset that fueled the Bush administration's response to 9/11 has fostered the worst abuses. "The immigrant community," Ibish said, "has borne the brunt of civil liberties abuses."
The alien registration push following the September 11th attacks, for example, a drive to bring thousands of Arab and Muslim people, particularly young men, into close contact with federal law enforcement officials, "had truly zero effect in terms of counter-terrorism," Ibish stated.
This mass round up did, however, "certainly express the idea that Arabs and Muslims are by definition potentially dangerous and of interest to the authorities," he added.
Racial and religious profiling of Arab and Muslim people as potential terrorists has been an unmitigated failure, Ibish said. Still, right-wing pundits continue to push for it. Why should we be concerned about an 80-year old white grandmother in an airport security line, they say, when "the real terrorists" are probably Middle Eastern, Muslim, and so on?
According to Ibish, the problem with racial profiling, aside from that fact that it is literally impossible to do when dealing with the many language groups and nationalities that compose the Arab and Muslim world, is that it signals to potential criminals who law enforcement officials are looking for and provides them with a means of changing their appearance to no longer fit the profile. "Why tell the potential terrorist what you are looking for," Ibish asked.
For this reason, truly random searches in airport security lines, for example, have a better deterrent effect than profiling, which, he said, has been shown to be "worse than useless."
In fact, in 1999 the Federal Aviation Administration admitted that it used a computer system in airport security lines to profile Arab and Muslim men as potential threats. Its failure to stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11, however, was a serious blow to proving its effectiveness, Ibish said.
Now, since airports and the federal transportation security officials have gotten serious about security, racial profiling has become much more difficult to detect. Officials who are serious about security understand that racial profiling is an ineffective security measure.
The right-wing's demand for racial profiling is meant to use race and religion to lump Arab and Muslim into a category of people who are likely or potential enemies, but it shows how detrimental racist thinking can be to real security, Ibish concluded.
Will the real terrorists please stand up?
If the "real terrorists" aren't among the Arab and Muslim population in the US, and they aren't in the Saddam Hussein regime, who are they? Who was behind the 9/11 attacks? What is this religious movement that appears to be behind so much violence in the Middle East?
In a post-lecture interview, Ibish held that Al Qaeda and "like-minded" people are part of a complex supra-national Islamic movement (even this is a bit confused, he saexplained, as some within this movement have nationalist tendencies) that, once on the fringes on Muslim society and detested by most Arab and Muslim people, have seen their fortunes improve primarily not because it is natural or instinctive for Muslim and Arab peoples to hate the "West," but because of Western policies toward the Middle East and the response by the Bush administration to the 9/11 attacks.
Ibish described this movement as the Salafist-Jihadist movement. It is a specific religious ideological outlook that favors violence against people and groups it declares to be apostates, even other Salafists. For the most part, it envisions a Muslim world without borders and for this reason has aimed much violence at Arab and Muslim peoples and governments.
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