Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Contention 1
Plan: The United States federal government should eliminate
the Screening Passengers by Observation Technique program.
The Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques or SPOT
Program in airports subjects Muslims to extra searches and
scrutiny [Retag maybe]
Berry 13
Maya Berry, Executive Director at the Arab American Institute, AAI Calls on DHS to
Terminate TSAs SPOT Behavioral Detection Program, ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE,
http://www.aaiusa.org/aai-calls-on-dhs-to-terminate-tsas-spot-behavioral-detectionprogram, 06/07/2013//SRawal
In light of recent developments in Congress, I write to urge you to take this opportunity to end the Transportation Security
are currently using the SPOT program. In light of these failures and as a result of the release of the DHSs inspector general report,
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) offered an amendment this week to the Department of Homeland Securitys (DHS) FY2014
appropriations bill that would have denied the Department funding for the SPOT program. Though the amendment failed on the
House floor, we urge you to take the opportunity offered by Rep. Thompsons amendment to terminate the SPOT program
immediately. As you know, on May 29th DHSs Office of Inspector General (OIG) released a report on the SPOT program that included
an audit of the programs costs and benefits.[1] The OIGs report found that DHS has spent $878 million on the SPOT program as of
September 2012, including training 2,800 behavior detection officers (BDOs). Ideally, BDOs work in pairs, using their training to spot
officers came forward last summer to expose widespread racial profiling at Logan. According to the officers, passengers were
instead has devolved into a racial profiling program that violates the civil rights of minority travelers. By embittering minority
travelers,
TSA and DHS endanger the work both agencies have done to forge
effective working relationships with potential allies like the Arab American
community. The combination of the damning May 29th IG report and Rep. Thompsons amendment to
the FY2014 appropriations bill present DHS and TSA with an opportunity
to end this failed program. On behalf of concerned Arab Americans, we
urge you to seize it.
At the airport, those who have so far (in the city, at the ticket
counter, and so on) been treated equally suddenly become suspect. At the
internal borders of the nation, they suddenly feel their protected status begin to
evaporate. Even those Muslims who do not consider themselves
particularly profiled or discriminated against in everyday life suddenly
begin to feel uneasy. Strip search and other security rites of passage
through the border show them the hard edge of the nation. Here Muslim
otherness is revealed in the most conspicuous way. Despite official efforts to present
full transparency.
searches at the airports as random, comedians like Dean Obeidallah skeptically ask their Muslim audiences: "Are you selected for
remarkable degree of transparency and universality. Muslims and non-Muslims alike can understand and laugh at airport and
airplane jokes. They are at once ethnic and national, particular and universal. These jokes represent the comic surface where Muslim
and American perspectives intersect most "dangerously" and with full intelligibility. Jokes about the airport experience thus
constitute a significant portion of the repertoire of Muslim comedians today.
agent asks passengers ahead a few cursory questions, then waves them
through. Your family is instead ushered into a separate room for more
than an hour of searching and questioning. This was the welcome that
Hassan Shibly, traveling with his wife and infant son, said they received in
August 2010, when they returned to the United States from Jordan, after traveling to
Mecca. Are you part of any Islamic tribe? Have you ever studied Islam full
time? How many gods do you believe in? How many prophets do you
believe in? the agent at New Yorks JFK Airport asked, according to
Shibly, 24, a Syrian-born Muslim American. He said the agent searched his
luggage, pulling out his Quran and a hand-held digital prayer counter. At
the end I guess (the agent) was trying to be nice he said, Sorry, I
hope you understand we just have to make sure nothing gets blown up,
said Shibly, a law school graduate who grew up in Buffalo. A decade after Islamic
extremists used airplanes to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
Muslim American travelers say they are still paying the price for terror
attacks carried out in the name of their religion. At airports, ports and
land crossings, many contend, they are repeatedly singled out for special
screening and intrusive questioning about their religious beliefs. Others
say they have been marooned overseas, barred from flights to the United
States. Stories come pouring out' Whenever a group of Muslims sit
together stories come pouring out, said real estate agent Jeff Siddique, a
Pakistan-born U.S. citizen who has lived in Seattle for 35 years. Its story after story
after story. That is supported by a survey released in August by the Pew Research
Center, in which 36 percent of Muslim Americans who traveled by air in the last year
said they had been singled out for special screening. According to a spokesman for
the TSA, some people are chosen randomly for secondary search, while others merit
secondary screening if their luggage contains things that raise questions. The TSA
is now adding a program called SPOT Screening Passengers by
Observation Technique. We have behavior detection officers who are all
over the airport, looking for people exhibiting behaviors that are
considered anomalous doing things that suggest they're trying to hide
something, said TSA spokesman Nick Kimball. They are observing the
queue. When that person gets up to the front, they would be referred to
the side. The TSA website calls the program a positive step that does
not require ethnic profiling but looks to the pattern of behavior. These
are tools that would allow us to be more precise, but without getting into racial
profiling, which is a bad thing.One of the most chilling cases surrounding the no-fly
list is that of Gulet Mohamed, a 19-year-old American citizen of Somali
heritage. Mohamed had been visiting family in Yemen and Somalia two
countries with active Islamist terrorist groups. When he went to the
Kuwait airport to extend his visa in December, he was arrested and taken
to a detention facility, where he was blindfolded, questioned and beaten
by unknown agents, according to his lawyer, Gadeir Abbas. The
questioners were especially interested in information about Anwar alAwlaki, a dual U.S. and Yemeni citizen turned Islamic extremist in Yemen,
Abbas said. Mohamed insisted he had no information and, after a week, Kuwait
ordered his deportation. But when he tried to board a flight to the United
States, he was told he was on the no-fly list. Only after Abbas filed a
lawsuit on his behalf in January was Mohamed allowed to return home to
Virginia. Mohamed is pursuing a claim for damages and to be removed
from the list. The federal government wants the case thrown out on the
grounds that it is irrelevant now that he is back in the U.S. Meantime, it
will not confirm if he is on the no-fly list. The lawsuit is pending, after a judge
moved it to a circuit court on jurisdictional grounds. Its this very Kafkaesque world
where no one has charged (people on the list) with any crime but they can see its
effects, said Abbas, an attorney with CAIR. His case is the most heinous
example of what the no-fly list can do. Other pending court cases allege that
Muslim American travelers have encountered similar violations of their rights,
including some who were forced to take thousand-mile circuitous land routes to get
back into the U.S. or were stuck overseas for weeks or months until lawyers here
took up their cases. The ACLU, which argues that the watch list system is
unconstitutional, has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department, the
FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center naming 20 people 18 U.S.
citizens and two permanent residents who allegedly have been
prevented from boarding airline flights to or from the U.S. The plaintiffs say
they were told by security or airline staff that their names were on the no-fly list.
Thousands of people have been barred altogether from commercial air travel
without any opportunity to confront or rebut the basis for their inclusion, or
apparent inclusion on the no-fly list," the lawsuits says. "The result is a vast and
growing list of individuals whom, on the basis of error or innuendo, the government
deems too dangerous to fly, but too harmless to arrest. In response, the
government objected on jurisdictional grounds and argued that the policy
does not violate the constitutional rights of the travelers because they
have not been denied the right to re-enter and reside in the United States,
nor have they been denied the ability to travel. But critics of the list note
that in cases like that of the lead plaintiff, Ayman Latif, a 33-year-old U.S.
citizen and disabled Marine Corps veteran, that would have meant weeks
of travel from the Middle East to the United States by sea and land, at
considerable additional expense. The U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore.,
dismissed the case on jurisdictional grounds, ruling that it should go instead to an
appeals court. The ACLU is appealing that decision.
might be in other law enforcement fields, it simply hasnt translated into success in aviation security. Rep. Sanford also agreed with
Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Steven Horsford (D-NV), and Donald Payne (D-NJ) that SPOTs guidelines defining
that someone can glance through faces in a crowded place like an airport
and tell if someone is being deceptive or lying, according to Charles
Honts, a lie detection expert at Boise State University. There are few (if
any) behaviors that are clearly linked to lying, scientists say. And it's
impossible to tell from observing someone for a few seconds in a security
line if they're keeping some kind of secret. Sure, someone might look a little
nervous or scared because they're about to commit a horrifying crime. But they
may just be nervous about flying or antsy that they're having to wait in line when
they're already running late for their flight. In 2013, the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) examined over 400 studies on lie detection.
From that huge survey, the organization concluded that the average
person can only tell if someone is lying 54% of the time . That's barely
better than pure chance. From the survey, the GAO concluded there's not
any scientific evidence that someone can learn to spot who's keeping a
secret and who's not, so it recommended that funding for the SPOT
program be limited until the TSA could provide some real evidence that
it's useful. The GAO report was just a recommendation though, and the SPOT
program is still up and running. If we consider what behavioral science tells us (or
can't tell us), it looks like we really need a new method for airport security checks.
"What we know about SPOT suggests it wastes taxpayer money, leads to racial
profiling, and should be scrapped," ACLU's staff attorney Hugh Handeyside said in
the lawsuit announcement.
Contention 2: Framing
Domestic surveillance prioritizes low probability impacts and
operates under the one percent doctrine kills decisionmaking
and creates an environment of racial profiling
Crampton 8 (Jeremy W. Crampton, Professor of Qualitative and Quantitative
Social Research University of Kentucky , "The Role of Geosurveillance and Security
in the Politics of Fear",
www.researchgate.net/publication/227135033_The_Role_of_Geosurveillance_and_Se
curity_in_the_Politics_of_Fear, May 2008, sr)
Some are statistical and involve the problem of
false positives and base rates. Even seem- ingly very accurate tests can
yield far more false positives than true hits, especially if the base rate is
low. This is especially a problem if data-mining surveillance is pursued
(such as the wide-scale warrantless wiretaps carried out by the USA).
an example of a profiling test that is 99 percent
accurate in the following sense: the profile will correctly detect terrorists
99 percent of the time, and correctly detect nonterrorists 99 percent of
the time. Assume a base rate of 1 in a million people in America is a
terrorist (about 300 people). The profile will find 297 of the terror- ists (99
percent). But it will also find that 1 percent of the rest fit the profile, or
in other words some 3 million false positives (Paulos 1996, 2006a).
There are several components of risk that are worth noting in this context.
The
mathematician John Allen Paulos describes the weakness of this surveillance with
known which of the positive hits are false and which true, all the positive hits will have to be investigated and surveilled. That is the logic that supports mass sur- veillance. For the same reason many doctors do not advocate
inappropriate screen- ing (for example, breast cancer screening): it will indicate many false positives and cause unnecessary worry and distress. A related issue concerns the work on human perception of risk discussed above. How
Even the latter means we will be wrong in one out of 20 cases. A third issue arises surrounding normalization. To assess risk it is necessary to know what comprises a normal state of affairs and
when that state of affairs has been deviated from. This might seem unobjectionable, but as more than one writer has discussed, the establishment of norms can have debilitating effects on those who are outside of those norms.
techniques were formalized to assist in the establishment of norms, including probability theory and the normal distribution curve. Many forms of mapping were also invented to establish what was normal across the geography of the
nation. These new techniques were used to create pro- files of groups. Then, if you belonged to the group, it was inferred that you fit the profile. Analysis was at the level of the group. This was easier than tracking people individually
We need to understand how mapping and other sources of geographical knowledge act to produce this politics of fear. The answer is not to cease using GIS and mapping
technologies (or only to use the good ones), but rather to be careful and critical about the knowledge that is constructed with them and the subsequent political rationalities that are supported by them. This claim might seem
unobjectionable, but in fact, it is often ignored. For example, in a major report in 2006 the National Research Council of the National Academies investigated the implications of new technologies in GISci, and wrote that as is true of
any technology GIS is neutral in and of itself (Committee on Beyond Mapping 2006: 47). Such a view- point traduces two decades of work in critical GIS and cartography. Surely, it is not the neutrality of technology but the very
filigrees of interrelationships between technology, power-knowledge, and societytheir geographically-situated and inherently political naturethat makes them so interesting and vital (Livingstone 2003). We cannot understand how
technologies work nor assess the rationalities they operate under if the context of their political deployment is not examined. In this light the recent paper by Klinkenberg (2007) is crucial, for he acknowledges that GIT are always
(Rummens, 2001, p.18). 6. The outgroup images become negative, homogeneous, abstract and stereotypical
particularly in regards to the productions of enemy
allows social stereotyping, group cohesiveness and collective action to occur. The construction of absolutist
discourses of this kind are an important vehicle for understanding conflict: [a]lthough generally described as
doers. He has been quoted as saying we're on the hunt...got the evildoers on the run...we're bringing them to
justice and they kill without mercy because they hate our freedoms... (Sample, 2006, The White House, 2001).
The emotive language used in speech acts of this kind are designed to
elicit in-group distinctiveness and cohesion through the negation and
disparagement of the out-group (terrorist organisations). The use of terms evil doers, them,
and they are interesting however in the sense that they refer to an enemy that extends beyond the confines of
terrorist organisations like Al Qaeda. 7. A clear and simplified depiction of good (us) and evil (them) that serves
The formula is
as follows: if the expla- nation of events is based on anti-Western cultural
and religious determinism, the responsibilities for Western political and
military action are eluded. Huntington's expression Islam's borders are
bloody dis- closed a culturalist explanation that released the West of all
responsibility for that blood bath. Huntington's main contribution was
Islam and the West is the maininstrument used to legitimize the effects of Western policy on Muslims to Western soci- eties.
believe that the key lies in the holy or sacrosanct nature of religious facts (although there are double standards since the Danish newspaper refused to
per- form the same experiment with Jesus Christ) because non-believers also have the right to not be constrained by beliefs they do not share. However,
what converted the publication of the cartoons in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten into a powder- keg situation was the Islamophobic nature and
incitement of hatred deriving from the portrayal of the founder of Islam as a ter- rorist. The nature of the message was clear: if the founder of Islam was a
terrorist then all its members are terrorists.
Structural violence is the largest proximate cause of warcreates priming that psychologically structures escalation
Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois 4
(Prof of Anthropology @ Cal-Berkely; Prof of Anthropology @ UPenn)
(Nancy and Philippe, Introduction: Making Sense of Violence, in Violence in War and Peace,
pg. 19-22)
This large and at first sight messy Part VII is central to this anthologys thesis. It encompasses everything from the routinized,
bureaucratized, and utterly banal violence of children dying of hunger and maternal despair in Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter
33) to elderly African Americans dying of heat stroke in Mayor Dalys version of US apartheid in Chicagos South Side (Klinenberg, Chapter
38) to the racialized class hatred expressed by British Victorians in their olfactory disgust of the smelly working classes (Orwell, Chapter
36). In these readings violence is located in the symbolic and social structures that overdetermine and allow the criminalized drug addictions,
interpersonal bloodshed, and racially patterned incarcerations that characterize the US inner city to be normalized (Bourgois, Chapter 37
and Wacquant, Chapter 39). Violence also takes the form of class, racial, political self-hatred and adolescent self-destruction (Quesada,
Absolutely
central to our approach is a blurring of categories and distinctions between wartime and peacetime
violence. Close attention to the little violences produced in the structures, habituses, and mentalites
of everyday life shifts our attention to pathologies of class, race, and gender inequalities. More important, it
Chapter 35), as well as of useless (i.e. preventable), rawly embodied physical suffering, and death (Farmer, Chapter 34).
interrupts the voyeuristic tendencies of violence studies that risk publicly humiliating the powerless who are often forced into complicity
with social and individual pathologies of power because suffering is often a solvent of human integrity and dignity. Thus, in this anthology
we are positing a violence continuum comprised of a multitude of small wars and invisible genocides (see also Scheper- Hughes 1996;
1997; 2000b) conducted in the normative social spaces of public schools, clinics, emergency rooms, hospital wards, nursing homes,
courtrooms, public registry offices, prisons, detention centers, and public morgues. The
constitute the small wars and invisible genocides to which we refer. This applies to African American and Latino youth
mortality statistics in Oakland, California, Baltimore, Washington DC, and New York City. These are invisible genocides not
because they are secreted away or hidden from view, but quite the opposite. As Wittgenstein observed, the
things that are hardest to perceive are those which are right before our eyes and therefore taken for
granted. In this regard, Bourdieus partial and unfinished theory of violence (see Chapters 32 and 42) as well as his concept of
misrecognition is crucial to our task. By including the normative everyday forms of violence hidden in the minutiae of normal social
practices - in the architecture of homes, in gender relations, in communal work, in the exchange of gifts, and so forth - Bourdieu forces us to
reconsider the broader meanings and status of violence, especially the links between the violence of everyday life and explicit political terror
and state repression, Similarly, Basaglias notion of peacetime crimes - crimini di pace - imagines a direct relationship between wartime
and peacetime violence. Peacetime
crimes suggests the possibility that war crimes are merely ordinary,
everyday crimes of public consent applied systematically and dramatically in the extreme context of
war. Consider the parallel uses of rape during peacetime and wartime, or the family resemblances between the legalized violence of US
immigration and naturalization border raids on illegal aliens versus the US government- engineered genocide in 1938, known as the
Cherokee Trail of Tears. Peacetime crimes suggests that everyday forms of state violence make a certain kind of domestic peace possible.
Internal stability is purchased with the currency of peacetime crimes, many of which take the form of professionally applied strangleholds. Everyday forms of state violence during peacetime make a certain kind of domestic peace possible. It is an easy-to-identify
peacetime crime that is usually maintained as a public secret by the government and by a scared or apathetic populace. Most subtly, but no
less politically or structurally, the phenomenal growth in the United States of a new military, postindustrial prison industrial complex has
taken place in the absence of broad-based opposition, let alone collective acts of civil disobedience. The
Collective denial and misrecognition are prerequisites for mass violence and
genocide. But so are formal bureaucratic structures and professional roles. The practical technicians of everyday violence in the
backlands of Northeast Brazil (Scheper-Hughes, Chapter 33), for example, include the clinic doctors who prescribe powerful tranquilizers to
fretful and frightfully hungry babies, the Catholic priests who celebrate the death of angel-babies, and the municipal bureaucrats who
close to what Bourdieu (1977, 1996) means by symbolic violence, the violence that is often nus-recognized for something else, usually
something good. Everyday violence is similar to what Taussig (1989) calls terror as usual. All these terms are meant to reveal a public
secret - the hidden links between violence in war and violence in peace, and between war crimes and peace-time crimes. Bourdieu (1977)
finds domination and violence in the least likely places - in courtship and marriage, in the exchange of gifts, in systems of classification, in
style, art, and culinary taste- the various uses of culture. Violence, Bourdieu insists, is everywhere in social practice. It is misrecognized
because its very everydayness and its familiarity render it invisible. Lacan identifies rneconnaissance as the prerequisite of the social. The
exploitation of bachelor sons, robbing them of autonomy, independence, and progeny, within the structures of family farming in the
European countryside that Bourdieu escaped is a case in point (Bourdieu, Chapter 42; see also Scheper-Hughes, 2000b; Favret-Saada, 1989).
Following Gramsci, Foucault, Sartre, Arendt, and other modern theorists of power-vio- lence, Bourdieu treats direct aggression and physical
violence as a crude, uneconomical mode of domination; it is less efficient and, according to Arendt (1969), it is certainly less legitimate.
While power and symbolic domination are not to be equated with violence - and Arendt argues persuasively that violence is to be understood
as a failure of power - violence, as we are presenting it here, is more than simply the expression of illegitimate physical force against a
person or group of persons. Rather, we need to understand violence as encompassing all forms of controlling processes (Nader 1997b) that
assault basic human freedoms and individual or collective survival. Our task is to recognize these gray zones of violence which are, by
definition, not obvious. Once again, the point of bringing into the discourses on genocide everyday, normative experiences of reification,
depersonalization, institutional confinement, and acceptable death is to help answer the question: What makes mass violence and genocide
possible? In this volume we are suggesting that
somehow defend them, this goes back all the way to the Spanish-American
war of 1898, which was supposed to be about rescuing Cubans. And
similarly, you see these sorts of justifications given. You know, Vietnamese
need to be defended. In Iraq, it was babies, apparently, who were being
bayoneted in Kuwait, and therefore the U.S. needed to intervene and
defeat Iraq in 1991. So this idea of humanitarianism has a long history
within the foreign policy establishment. But what makes it particularly
potent in this case is that after 9/11 what you see is the Bush
administration projecting this idea of clash of civilizations, which is
basically the notion that we in the West are democratic, we are rational,
we are civilized, we are, you know, all things wonderful, and they in the
East are barbaric, they're misogynistic, and so on and so forth, and
therefore we have an obligation, what used to be called the white man's
burden, to go off and rescue them. And so you see some of that language,
which is the idea that Arabs cannot bring democracy by themselves, they
cannot make change, and so we need to intervene. So it's a combination
both of the victim narrative, which has a long history, combined with this
language of clash of civilizations. DESVARIEUX: Okay. And how does this fit into
domestic policy? How do they work Islamophobia into domestic policy? KUMAR:
Right. I mean, the comparison I make in the book and that I'm actually
working on in the next book is that the U.S. government, and U.S.
imperialism in particular, always needs an enemy. That is, when there is no
humanitarian cause, an enemy is an extremely useful way to justify wars
abroad, as well as the policing of dissent at home. So, for instance, during
the Cold War we had been menacing enemy of the Soviet Union, against
whom both a hot and a Cold War had to be waged. And, of course, this
justified, then, McCarthyism, because there's always a reflection of the
external enemy inside, and these people have to be rounded up,
blacklisted, and so on and so forth. So that's the logic back then, and, of
course, it was entirely about a politics of fear. Today we have the same sort of thing.
After 9/11, the war on terror comes into being precisely about fighting
endless wars. Remember, back in 9/11 the Bush administration was going
to start with Afghanistan, go to Iraq, and then Iran, Syria, and so on and
so forth. It didn't work out that way. But the idea was to drum up this fear
of this menacing terrorist enemy, which justified wars all over the world in
order to gain the U.S.'s interest in [incompr.] particularly in the oil-rich
region in the Middle East. You asked me about domestic politics. Always
there was a reflection of the domestic in terms of the international threat.
And so what you've seen is innocent Muslims--and often actually not even
Muslims, people from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, some
of them Sikhs, some some of them Hindus, some of them Christians, and
so on, being racially profiled because that is the logic that comes out of
this. I have a whole chapter in the book about how the legal system has
been reworked so as to justify things like indefinite detention, things like
torture, things like deportation. And, frankly, the infiltration of agents into our
schools, into my school, into colleges, and so forth. So, you know, it's truly horrific
the extent to which Muslim Americans and people who look Muslim have
T
Profiling is a form of surveillance which the plan directly
decreases
Adey 4
Peter Adey, professor of geography that arrived in Royal Holloway at the start of
2012, and took up leadership of the new Geopolitics and Security MSc, an exciting
new programme with Politics and International Relations, Secured and Sorted
Mobilities: Examples from the Airport, SURVEILLANCE AND SOCIETY,
http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(4)/sorted.pdf, 2004//SRawal
The most recently publicized and perhaps most worrying form of
surveillant sorting at airports has come through a surveillance technique
known as profiling. Profiling is the ability for information or data about an
individual to be built up. People may be sorted into profiles of particular consumer groups. The psychological
profiles crime investigators use is an obvious example. Profiles are then used to predict a persons likely behaviour or the likely
light of the growth of international terrorism, a new form of profiling has been developed called Computer Assisted Passenger PreScreening (CAPPS) in the United States. It is possible to discuss here some of the issues surrounding profiling and its potential
impacts.
passengers, as well as members of the traveling public" according to the 14-page report published online by DHS earlier this month.
K
Perm
Muoz 10 (Gema Martn-Muoz, Professor of Sociology Arab and Islamic World,
"Unconscious Islamophobia", scholarworks.umb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=1379&context=humanarchitecture, Voume 8, Issue 2 Islam: From Phobia to
Understanding, 1/1/2010, sr)
This transmitted a dangerous message that stigmatized and humiliated a large part of humankind. Thereafter, the ques- tion
is not religious but political because it concerns something as detestable
as racism and xenophobia. In this respect, freedom of expression cannot
be an absolute value that, devoid of any sense of responsibility, is used to
abuse this privilege. In this respect, it is of little importance that there are
despotic regimes in the Muslim world that do not respect the rights of
their own or other citizens: examples include the Ira- nian president who
continually makes aberrant statements or the fact that there are terrorist
groups that only represent a minority. The existence of these realities
cannot serve as arguments to justify any type of racism or intolerance.
This is espe- cially true because when such argument are aimed at lawabiding citizens, individuals, human beings who, in addition to having to
endure these situations of oppression and injustice, suffer insults and
offences and are treated as inferiors. Since the car-toon crisis, there has been a clear failure to defend freedom of
expression and out- rightly reject the Islamophobic message transmitted in these cartoons, since there can be no room for the incitement of hatred and
xenophobia in any European demo- cratic system. A different response would have enabled an ethical reconciliation with all Muslims who were offended
by these cartoons and could have helped temper the situation. It is also impossible to reconstruct an apparently ideal situation since some sectors of
society expect the Muslim iden- tity of these citizens to dissipate and even gradually disappear during their process of European integration. According to
some, the best Muslim is one that visibly ceases to be one, hence the tendency to distinguish between good Muslims and bad Mus- lims. The former
would be Westernized Muslims who declare themselves to be sec- ular and often, without having scientific qualifications, confirm our demonized stereotypes of Islam and its alleged dis- eases. Westernized Muslims are often her- alded as the only possible ambassadors of their society and culture
). If
the rest do not prove that they are good Mus- lims, they are considered
bad Muslims. That is not the situation that must be addressed in
Western countries, but rather the situation regarding the integration and
civil normalization of many people who are Muslims and who do not want
to stop being Muslims. To achieve this, we must accept the physical,
human and territorial visibility of a people who are already part of
Europes identity. Of course, this does not mean that Muslims are not
required to abide by the laws applicable to all citizens, regardless of their
race, sex and religion. The former must never exclude the latter. However,
the best way to achieve the latter is to not exclude the former.
(although they are often merely smokescreens that prevent us from obtaining accurate knowledge of the diverse reality of the Muslim world