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Britain is considering adopting racial and ethnic profiling procedures to help identify potential terrorists, a move British Metropolitan police chief superintendent Ali Dizaei has condemned as creating the new offence of “traveling while Asian”.

And two young men of “Middle Eastern or Asian” appearance were removed from a holiday flight after their fellow passengers complained that they were acting suspiciously:

In the early hours of Wednesday a number of passengers on Monarch Airlines flight ZB613 left the plane, refusing to fly unless the two men were removed, causing a three-hour delay. Passengers are reported to have become suspicious after the men were overheard apparently speaking Arabic and seen repeatedly checking their watches, although this has not been confirmed by the airline.

If people who speak Arabic and check their watches frequently in airports are to be acted against, and if the colour of one’s skin is to once again become the determining factor in how one is treated by the police, perhaps it’s time to start jamming the culture a little bit.

That’s why I propose we put our heads together and start up a new company selling t-shirts with Arabic on them whose sayings translate into punchy commentary such as Declare Jihad on Illiteracy, or I Love America, or perhaps I Prayed to Allah on a Plane and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.

We could also screen-print the image of some bearded, scary-looking dude on them to really make the point, like Abraham Lincoln:

What do you think?

[tags]terrorism,paranoia,politics,security[/tags]