Terrorism “expert” Neil Livingstone hit town Tuesday night at the Texas Union, imparting his hired wisdom on the current international crisis. Among Tuesday’s pearls, according to The Daily Texan: Livingstone claims that despite their own bad experiences with racial profiling, most blacks support ethnic profiling of Arabs. He added that most Arab-Americans are willing to subject themselves to such profiling for the good of the nation.
Not surprisingly, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) takes a dim view of his specific opinions and Livingstone in general.
“So what?” says Hussein Ibish, ADC communications director. “That’s true, but so what? Polls do show that blacks feel that way, but it’s no justification for it. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong. … We [may] think having a bad experience ought to make you sympathetic to others, and that suffering is ennobling. Neither is true. … The point is, racial profiling is bad policy, bad law enforcement, and indefensibly unfair.”
As for Arab-Americans willingly giving in to such treatment, “That’s completely false. A couple of isolated polls suggested that a small majority wouldn’t mind, but nobody wants to be ethnically profiled, and nobody wants to institute a system of ethnic profiling — except Livingstone, who has a history of no regard for human rights.
“Vincent Cannistraro,” Ibish concluded, “is a bona fide terrorism expert. He is the former head of counterterrorism for the CIA, and he has pointed out that profiling won’t help security and it will only debase our society. That doesn’t bother Livingstone. The man’s a disgrace.”
(For more on Livingstone, see “Nailing Down Neil” in last week’s “Naked City.”)
This article appears in November 9 • 2001.