"They're selling postcards of the hanging, they're painting the passports brown..." - Bob Dylan, Desolation Row
So here's the punchline, right upfront :
The Bush Administration appears to have attempted to get the UK to accede to a special visa program targeting only British citizens of Pakistani descent.
And the Bush crew appears to have gotten slapped.
It was absurd and vicious to begin with: as an analogy, consider a program that would compel black American citizens, maybe black males between the ages of 15 and 35 in particular to wear special armbands or carry a special form of ID because that age and ethnic group had an especially high crime rate. Get the picture ?
Of course, I could bring up the Nazis, Jews, and the infamous "yellow star"...
But, here's a more recent. sobering incident:
Last winter, a US talk radio host pulled off a hoax that revealed a surprising number of his callers agreed with the proposition that American Muslim citizens should be tattooed with crescent shapes on their foreheads of arms, or forced to wear identifying armbands.
Many callers in to Jerry Klein's show agreed and told him his proposals didn't go far enough. The Wikpedia has a nice writeup on the incident, and here's an excerpt, sans links:
On Nov. 26, 2006 radio host Jerry Klein of WMAL 630 AM (covering Washington DC, Northern Virginia and Maryland) had a program that was "focused on public reaction to the removal of six Imams, or Islamic religious leaders, from a US Airways flight."[1] (See Flying Imams controversy). In an effort to gauge his audience's reaction said that force should be applied to ensure that all Muslims in America wear "identifying markers. ...I'm thinking either it should be an arm band, a crescent moon arm band, or it should be a crescent moon tattoo. ...If it means that we have to round them up and do a tattoo in a place where everybody knows where to find it, then that's what we'll have to do."[2][1] The response was overwhelming "the phone lines jammed instantly", Klein later stated that "The switchboard went from empty to totally jammed within minutes. There were plenty of callers angry with me, but there were plenty who agreed."[1]. While some callers said he was "off his rocker", others insisted that his statement did not go far enough, calling for forced mass exile: "Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country...they are here to kill us." Others called for Muslims to be placed in concentration camps: "You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans.""[1] At the end of the show he revealed that his statements were a hoax, saying "I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said. For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting. Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."
Now, the Bush Administration appears to be trying to get into the ethnic and religious discrimination game in a big way, by attempting to require British citizens who are of Pakistani origin to get special visas in order to visit the United States. Currently, British citizens are not required to apply for visas to enter the US.
As the Guardian reported today:
The American government wants to impose travel restrictions on British citizens of Pakistani origin because of concerns about terrorism, according to a report today.
In talks with the British government, the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, called for British Pakistanis to apply for a visa before travelling to the US, according to the New York Times.
The newspaper claimed that US officials were concerned about the number of terrorist plots in Britain involving citizens with ties to Pakistan.
But today the Foreign Office made it clear would resist the idea. It said it would oppose any attempt to exclude particular ethnic groups from the US visa waiver scheme that allows citizens from 27 countries, including the UK, to travel to the US without a visa for up to 90 days....
Mohammad Sarwar, the Labour MP for Glasgow Central, described the proposal as "unbelievable and shocking. Every British citizen must have the same rights. I don't think America has any right to interfere in this way."
Now, first of all, as Cliff Schecter points out:
The people who took down the World Trade Center were from Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon or Egypt. Have similiar restrictions gone out for people with this kind of ancestry?
Oh look, they eased up the restrictions for the Saudis in 2005!!
But wait !
Now, the US and the UK are denying this story, which originated in a New York Times story also published today. After running the first Guardian story, now a new story on this has popped up on the Guardian's front page, written by the Guardian's diplomatic editor, Julian Borger !:
British and US officials today denied a report that the US was seeking ways of imposing entry restrictions for visiting Britons of Pakistani origin, following a spate of UK bomb plots involving citizens with links to Pakistan.
The report in the New York Times, quoted unnamed British officials as saying that the US had put several options on the table, including a cancellation of the existing visa waiver programme, which allows British tourists to visit without a visa, or a requirement that British Pakistanis would have to apply for visas.
The US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, had raised the issue with the British government in recent months, the article said.
Schecter concludes: the US tried, got slapped by the UK, and decided to deny it all.
Meanwhile, the US has its own home grown terrorism problem, as one observer remarked:
"The underbelly of the Christian right is as scary as anything that ever dwelled in a Tora Bora cave." - Bob Norman, the Broward-Palm Beach New Times, as cited by "moiv" in Brothers Under The Skin, about the violent, terrorist wing of the American antiabortion movement
Here's the beginning I just did, today, about various types of recent hate speech from the American right and Christian right, and on one attempted bombing at a Texas abortion clinic, entitled Gay Hating, Abortion Clinic Bombings, Veiled Threats on "race mixing":
moiv", an anonymous Talk To Action writer who covers reproductive rights, addresses a recent attempted bombing, against a Texas abortion clinic, in light of past bombings of abortion clinics, in Wilfully Blind:
Many professed shock after last week's attempted bombing of an Austin women's clinic. Others felt shocked by their shock, since the religious right's thinly disguised rhetoric of hatred has so permeated our public discourse as to have become the norm. But for some it is easier to pretend not to see what is before their faces, far easier to remain willfully blind.
In 1998, nurse Emily Lyons lost her left eye, was partially blinded in her right and sustained other horrific and disabling injuries when another bomb -- similarly packed with nails that flew as deadly shrapnel -- was detonated at a Birmingham clinic by Eric Rudolph.
Indeed, the US has a bit of a problem with domestic terrorism