In light of the recent terror attacks, Ted Cruz called for surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods. He seems to be implying that Muslims are some kind of enemy population. Another reminder: Japanese-Americans were considered enemies and forced to live in internment camps during World War II!
This Muslim surveillance is not a new concept. There was a 2013 lawsuit against the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Policy. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of mosques and some charitable Muslim organizations. They said that this program violated the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the First Amendment’s religious protections.
Here is a video of his statement about the topic:
https://youtu.be/n0eyn3D72V0
The Muslim hatred is not bound to just adults. Children are learning these racist behaviours from their parents. There was the case in Ohio of a 7th-grader calling a Muslim 6th grader “towel head,” “ISIS,” and even blamed him for the 9/11 attacks (even though neither child was born then). He even went so far as to say he would get his dad’s gun and shoot the Muslim child.
Yes, we need to keep the country safe, but profiling a large group of people is not the way to do it. If we head down this rabbit hole, we will be on a downhill slope toward a repeat of history’s scariest moments.
The Anti Defamation League declared:
“The overwhelming majority of Muslim-Americans are law abiding people who are as outraged by terrorism and bigotry as Americans of any other faith … It is an irrational approach that harkens back to a dark and tragic chapter in American history—the relocation of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans to internment camps during the Second World War. Simply because of their ethnicity.”
We should be able to fight terrorism without unfairly targeting innocent people.
Featured image by Donkey Hotey via flickr, available under Creative Commons 2.0 license.
