Political Correctness Gone Mad

by Henry Farrell on December 28, 2009

Perhaps the recent “terrorist outrage in the skies”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/us/27terror.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1261890636-QVFR8dRHo8PyDIMOJsWiaA will bring the delusional opponents of group profiling to their senses. But I fear not. It should be a cut and dried case. A “member of a group”:http://www.google.com/search?q=Abdulmutallab+engineering&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a that is “notoriously”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ “associated with terrorist violence and fundamentalist political beliefs”:http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/users/gambetta/Engineers%20of%20Jihad.pdf tries to set off a bomb in a plane and only fails because of sheer luck. The nabobs of political correctness will try to convince us yet again that there are many strains of thought among these people, that most of them are non-violent, that compulsory cavity searches will alienate them and so on, and on, and on. But the PC mafia will be ignoring these people’s plans to “build temples that dominate our major cities”:http://web.mit.edu/facilities/construction/completed/completed.html, and “actions taken deliberately to flout our common norms”:http://hacks.mit.edu/. A strong country has a strong culture that it is willing to defend against the enemy – and a willingness to ignore the natterers of multiculturalism when its citizens’ lives are in danger. We were lucky this time. We may not be so lucky the next.