A questionable challenge to political correctness
Paul Nachman writes:
The stupidity of the American establishment is seen in this item From National Review (my boldfacing):
An epidemic of political correctness may also be part of the problem, says [James] Woolsey. “I don’t think we should focus just on people from the Middle East, but generally speaking, we are talking about males in their late teens to 40 or so,” he says. “I don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t put young men under particularly rigorous scrutiny and double-check all of them. You really have to be an extremist with respect to political correctness to think you can’t treat young men differently from grandmothers.”
“My family, we’re all WASPS,” says Woolsey. “All three of my sons say we should be scrutinizing people like them: guys in their 20s and 30s. They say they’d be glad to go through three checks at the airport. Behavioral distinctions are also something to focus on—people who are acting funny, people who don’t have baggage, people who pay in cash. Those things have nothing to do with race, ethnicity, or religion and seem entirely appropriate as reasons for double-checking or having them go through special scanning machines.”
It’s also stupid, when you think about it for even a second, that paying in cash and having no luggage are touted as useful screening criteria. The next time, for sure, the terrorist is going to check a meaningless suitcase, just to avoid that particular problem. (One wonders how the 12/25 guy was as stupid as that. By the way, with respect to tickets bought with cash, I read somewhere that, coming out of Africa, it’s not unusual and there are good reasons for it.)
LA replies:
Yes, this is what as known as opposing the reign of political correctness: saying that WASPs pose an equal danger of being Islamic terrorists as Muslims, and that the likelihood of one’s being an Islamic terrorist has nothing to do with one’s religion. What intellectual courage, what manly boldness Woolsey displays, to speak truth to power!
Woolsey has been a part of the neocon foreign policy establishment at least since his brief tenure as CIA director early in the Clinton administration, when, as he explained later, Clinton never once met with him one on one, and Woolsey felt Clinton was not serious about intelligence and national security. So Woolsey is known as a hard liner.
Yet his comment here is a perfect example of the slightly “conservative” liberal type: in Woolsey’s own mind, he’s a path breaking critic of PC!
Paul Nachman replies:
Maybe I get your point. Woolsey thinks he’s being daring and politically incorrect by saying we should focus on males of “athletic” ages. (Actually that’s kind of stupid by itself. Has it ever been politically incorrect to demonize white men in that, or any, age category?) But then he follows up with the hyper-politically-correct notion that white men are just as likely to be problems as Arabs.
January 5
Nik S. writes:
Luckily for us, age discrimination is also outlawed:
“An epidemic of political correctness may also be part of the problem, says [James] Woolsey. “I don’t think we should focus just on people from the Middle East, but generally speaking, we are talking about males in their late teens to 40 or so,” he says. “I don’t see any reason why one shouldn’t put young men under particularly rigorous scrutiny and double-check all of them. You really have to be an extremist with respect to political correctness to think you can’t treat young men differently from grandmothers.”“
This author does have a point, however: if you look at crime and terrorist statistics, a great majority of atrocities have been committed by men between the age of 13 and 40. But yes, it is a pitiful non-solution, I agree.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 05, 2010 01:07 AM | Send