- If the public are asked whether Arabs should be profiled for security reasons, why should it be surprising if a very slight majority of the public think they should be? A large number of terrorist incidents have occurred in the Arab and Western world in recent years.
- If, at some point, large numbers of, say, Czechs, Poles and Hungarians had started to export terrorism across the planet, a majority of the public in a country such as Britain might be relied on to call for increased security checks on people of Eastern European origin. In the meantime, the public would appear to be guilty of nothing other than reading the news.
- Few newspaper commentaries bothered to wonder whether the people who had decapitated a soldier on the streets of London might not be responsible for the negative sentiments that followed. For Arab News, any such explanation would be an impossibility.
"...What is more ridiculous still is the idea -- consistent from a range of opinion polls over recent years -- that the British people, like those across Europe and America, are in the grip of some profoundly irrational mania....The central conceit of a poll such as this, however, is, of course, to present the whole issue of terrorism as a misunderstanding by the general public.
The issue is not just the four Islamist attacks in the UK so far this year...
The issue is not the appearance of a Libyan suicide bomber at a pop concert in Manchester in May, or the young men of Pakistani origin who rampaged across London Bridge and into Borough Market in June, while they slit the throats of passers-by and shouted, "This is for Allah".
...The question they seem to wish to get to the root of is: Why the British people might have bigoted and unpleasant attitudes?..."
Read on!
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