Tunku Varadarajan, a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School, wrote a remarkable piece in Forbes a few days ago. ‘Going Muslim’ is remarkable not because it’s brilliant or reflects critical acumen; it’s remarkable because its idiotic, racist drive toward continuing to ‘other’ Arab/Muslim men was written by an ‘other.’ Here are some choice quotes:

“The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis.”

“We are a civilized society. One of our cardinal rules of coexistence is that we (try always to) judge people only by their actions and not by their identity, whether racial, religious or sexual. This is our great strength as a society, and also, in the present circumstances, our great weakness: How to address the threat posed by the fact that, of the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in our midst, there are a few (perhaps many more than a few) who are so radicalized that they would kill their fellow Americans? Must we continue to be neutral in handling all people from different groups even though we know that there are differential risks posed by people of one group?…Muslims are the most difficult “incomers” in the ongoing integration challenge, which America has always handled with pride—and a kind of swagger…”

See, the educated brown man, Tunku, implies that we should, generally speaking, racially profile Arab and Muslim men because our national freedoms depend on it. If you see an Arab or Muslim man that doesn’t look like they have fully integrated into the American imaginarie, you should go tell Homeland Security so they can come and make everyone safe again. Then God will come down and give Americans rainbows for  being, well, awesome and then heavens will part because another jihadi was taken off the streets.

We’re never going to be safe again. Have we learned nothing from Pearl Harbor?  We can, however, as a nation acknowledge our past and present role in the political subjugation of non-Americans and take steps to rectify some of our ‘unjustifiable’ engagements. Acknowledging history is not about loving or hating America; it’s about responsibility. I am no foreign policy expert but I am pretty sure that racial profiling will do little to end what appears to be an ideologically motivated battle (i.e. the ‘War on Terror’). Innocent people will end up in jail because of what they are but the ideas of Western Infidels or whatever supposedly Muslim, anti-American ideas we’re fighting will continue on, materializing in different ways.

Hilariously enough, Tunku fails to acknowledge that the results of such a political and cultural intiaitive would proably result in him getting jumped, beaten up, or worse yet, killed for being confused for ‘one of them.’ See, Tunku, the kind of Americans that want license to act on racial profiling are most likely the same group of Americans who will not be able to distinguish one generic brown dude from another; you all look the same in the light and in the dark.

Nice work, Tunku. It must be a great feeling knowing that you’ve published a piece that attempts to justify racial profiling (or more?) against a group of people that you might be attacked for because you’re confused for one of them. When you get jumped by a group of trigger-happy lovers of America, I hope you’ll reconsider the arguments you made in your article.