Last updated on April 24th, 2013 at 01:20 pm
In their rush to condemn all Muslims (“all terrorists are Muslims” , Kilmeade, circa 2010), Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade asked why we don’t use racial profiling to prevent terrorism. The bad news for Kilmeade is that the alleged terrorists he’s referring to are from a region from whence the term “Caucasian” originates. Literally. They are the original European Caucasians.
Watch here via Media Matters:
To get more stories like this, subscribe to our newsletter The Daily.
Kilmeade wanted to know why we can’t profile?! “Why can’t we go through that model in order to narrow down who that the perpetrator might be?”
Guest Pete Hegseth, the Chief Executive Officer for Concerned Veterans for America, suggested that we need to check out these Mosques in Boston where they are “radicalizing” people leading to violence like we just saw. He assured us that this is not about race or targeting people. Just focusing on the facts.
Let’s take him at his word. If we applied the same formula for white men who go on mass shooting sprees, we’d profile gun owning, white men. I don’t think that’s where Fox meant to take this argument.
Also, Hegseth based his presumptions upon his military experience in the Middle East. However, this is the United States, not the Middle East. The largest segment of American Muslims resides in Dearborn, Michigan, where they live peacefully next to a large segment of Jewish and Christian Americans. They have plenty of Mosques, in which they engage in the peaceful practice of their religion, as an integrated part of the larger community. Why doesn’t the “one bad apple” defense that Republicans rush to use in order to justify/explain white mass shooters apply to Muslims? Both are killing Americans.
But the biggest irony is that Fox wants to racially profile the original Caucasians. Slate reported:
The suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing have been identified as brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Their family apparently originated in Chechnya, in the northern part of the Caucasus Mountains.
So why do we call white people Caucasians? The term was popularized by the German scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who in 1795 divided the human species into five races: Caucasian, the “white” race; Mongolian, the “yellow” race; Malayan, the “brown” race; Ethiopian, the “black” race; and American, the “red” race. He considered the Caucasians to be the first race on Earth, consistent with the common conception of the Caucasus as a place of human origin. The Bible describes Noah landing his ark at a place called Mount Ararat, which was thought by Europeans of Blumenbach’s time to be on the modern Turkish-Armenian border. (Ararat is still the name of the largest mountain in Turkey.) In Greek mythology, Zeus chained Prometheus to a rock in the Caucasus.
So, today, Kilmeade unwittingly called for the racial profiling of Caucasians.
Which might be a good idea, since the majority of mass shooters are white men. Fox News has, by accident, stumbled upon a great truth. If any “ethnic” group is terrorizing and killing Americans, it’s the growing number of disturbed, angry, “lone wolf”/”bad apple” white men with access to guns and a desire to kill as many Americans as possible. By all means, we should put an end to the “political correctness” that silences this truth in order to protect a has-been majority still clinging to their power.
No one expects a Fox News anchor to have a grasp on history, context, or the actual meaning of words, let alone understand that people much smarter than they have already determined that their great idea is not such a super plan in a democracy. We all know what Kilmeade “meant”, but it was a fail worthy of noting in that it represents possibly the first good idea he’s ever had.
Listen to Sarah on the PoliticusUSA Pod on The Daily newsletter podcast here.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
