veiled4allah: racial profiling strikes again

The Electronic Privacy Information Center reports:

EPIC has obtained documents revealing that the Census Bureau provided the Department of Homeland Security statistical data on people who identified themselves on the 2000 census as being of Arab ancestry. The special tabulations were prepared specifically for the law enforcement agency. There is no indication that the Department of Homeland Security requested similar information about any other ethnic groups. The tabulations apparently include information about United States citizens, as well as individuals of Arab descent whose families have lived in the United States for generations. One tabulation shows cities with populations of 10,000 or more and with 1,000 or more people who indicated they are of Arab ancestry. For each city, the tabulation provides total population, population of Arab ancestry, and percent of the total population which is of Arab ancestry.

A second tabulation, more than a thousand pages long, shows the number of census responses indicating Arab ancestry in certain zip codes throughout the country. The responses indicating Arab ancestry are subdivided into Egyptian, Iraqi, Jordanian, Lebanese, Moroccan, Palestinian, Syrian, Arab/Arabic, and Other Arab.

The heavily redacted documents show that in April 2004, a Census Bureau analyst e-mailed a Department of Homeland Security official and said, "You got a file of Arab ancestry information by ZIP Code Tabulation Area from me last December (2003). My superiors are now asking questions about the usage of that data, given the sensitivity of different data requests we have received about the Arab population."

The same day, a Department of Homeland Security Customs and Border Protection official e-mailed the analyst to explain, "At U.S. International airports, U.S. Customs posts signage informing various nationalities of the U.S. Customs regulations to report currency brought into the US upon entry . . . . My reason for asking for U.S. demographic data is to aid the Outbound Passenger Program Officer in identifying which language of signage, based on U.S. ethnic nationality population, would be best to post at the major International airports."

During World War II, the Census Bureau provided statistical information to help the War Department round up more than 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans and confine them to internment camps.

The tabulations were produced using data from the 2000 census long-form questionnaire, which goes to only a sample of the population. The tabulation figures, therefore, do not provide an entirely accurate representation of the Arab American population.

The site provides links to the documents received via the FOIA request.

Do we really need to go through all the old arguments about racial profiling again? Less than half of all American Muslims are of Arab descent. Less than half of all Arab-Americans are Muslim. Even if this kind of thing was justifiable, which I don't believe it is, a lot of Muslims would not be caught by it (non-Arab Muslims, including people like "dirty bomb" suspect Jose Padilla, a Latino convert) while a lot of people who have nothing to do with Islam (non-Muslim Arabs) would be caught up.

And what about terrorism committed by other groups? I know that some people have a hard time understanding this concept but terrorism is not some kind of unique Muslim phenomenon. It is a tactic used by groups worldwide, of any religion, race, or ethnicity. And this doesn't even get into American domestic terrorism (Timothy McVeigh, anyone?)

As long as Arabs and Muslims are being uniquely singled out and targeted while terrorist groups of other ethnicities and religions who are equally bad are ignored, it will appear that we are not interested in genuinely combating terrorism as a security threat but are more concerned with engaging in a "war against Islam". It may be that the threat posed by Arab and/or Muslim groups is greater than the threat posed by other groups, but I see very little comparative threat analysis or even much discussion of this issue at all. And will we use the same measures to combat other groups, including profiling by race or religion? Let's get past the fevered "Islam is evil" talk and see some serious discussion.