Please, Please Take Our Freedom Away! The daily Internet opinion poll on the website iWon.com today addressed plans by New York City to have police conduct "random searches" of bags carried by people trying to enter the subway system. People who refuse to be searched would be refused the right to ride a subway system they pay for twice, once in fares and once in taxes that subsidize the service.
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The results so far this morning are:

What do you think of random searches on commuters to prevent and deter terrorism on mass transit systems?

49% - A minor and necessary inconvenience
31% - A nuisance, but still necessary
4% - An unnecessary exercise
9% - A violation of my civil liberties
2% - None of the above
4% - I'm not sure

How many searches does New York plan to conduct? What conceivable good would a small number of such searches do? If a great many searches are to be conducted, how many would be necessary to accomplish so much as one thing, and how much would that interfere with the functioning of "rapid transit"?
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About.com says:

The New York City subway consists of 468 stations, 277 of them [ ] underground.... Approximately 4.5 million passengers ride the subway daily, totalling 1.384 billion rides in 2003.

An op-ed piece in today's rightwing New York Post ridicules random searches. Michelle Malkin writes:

"Random," of course, is a synonym for blind. And we all know what it means when you put blind bureaucrats in charge of homeland security: Grannies and toddlers, prepare to be on heightened grope alert.

Malkin's quarrel is not with searches but with randomness. She wants racial profiling! Don't bother innocent Amuricans. Focus on them durned Ayrabs! Her point might be more persuasive were she not a Jewess — oh, so sorry! -ess endings are forbidden among the "politically correct", even conservatives! (By the way, for people outside New York, "Jew" is not a dirty word. I actually heard some black guy on TV recently equating "Jew" with "nigger" as rude words he shies away from! But I don't want to seem condescending. In seventh grade, in Little Silver, NJ, I had to ask a female Jewish friend if "Jew" was an insult. She informed me that it was not, just descriptive, and something Jews are ordinarily happy to be called.)
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Michelle Malkin wants Ayrabs to be watched like hawks (hmm; that expression is grammatically vague, isn't it? It implies a predicate: "... like hawks watch fieldmice" or such), but 'decent folk' to be let alone.
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How often in the course of a given day are Ayrabs to be hassled? Once for every 10 Ayrabs or Pakis? Twice a day for each and every last one of them durned furriners? 100 times a day until they leave this country and go back where the f**k they came from?
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Would Michelle Malkin and all other Jews in this country like to be singled out for such treatment because the country they can be presumed to be loyal to, Israel, is the be-all and end-all of the troubles we have with the Arab world, the very cause of 9/11? I suspect they would not. We could require them to wear some identifying mark so we can know whom to search, say, a yellow star of David. Oops, that's been done. To death.
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So let's shift everything onto Ayrabs, and require them, and all them other Mohammedamns to wear a star and crescent so us reggaler Amuricans is able to ID the bastids fer sher, and leave good ole Amuricans alone!
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Fareed Zakaria, editor of the international edition of Newsweek, was on Comedy Central's Daily Show last nite. He's a frequent guest whose insights (Jewish-)host Jon Stewart values, even tho Zakaria wrote one of the all-time stupidest and most dishonest pieces of crap about the Middle East I ever read, an extended 'analysis' of the reasons Arabs hate us that appeared in Newsweek on October 15, 2001, a mere month after the 9/11 attacks. Here is a typical passage:

Now we get to Israel. It is obviously one of the central and most charged problems in the region. But it is a problem to which we cannot offer the Arab world support for its solution — the extinction of the state. We cannot in any way weaken our commitment to the existence and health of Israel. Similarly, we cannot abandon our policy of containing Saddam Hussein. He is building weapons of mass destruction.

(I pass over the oft-disproved bulls**t about Saddam having been "building weapons of mass destruction" — for this purpose only.)
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No, we can't dissolve the State of Israel and merge it into a secular Palestine, in which no one, of any group, is treated better than anyone else, of any other group, because, hmm, because, well, because — I don't know. Why the hell can't we?
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No, Zakaria's explanation for why Arabs hate us is not that we kill them by the truckload, back Israel's crimes to the hilt, slaughter Arab children in decades of one-sided war against Iraq thru two wars and a decade of "sanctions" that starved the poor and kept medicine from the sick. No, Arabs hate us because we are a success and they are failures! Of course that's why they hate us-in-particular.
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They don't, as Usama bin Laden pointed out, hate nor attack Sweden, another very successful and very rich country, because it is free. They attack us because we are rich and free. Of course they do. Right. Would you like to buy a bridge?
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Mr. Zakaria was born in India, and is one of those people with Moslem-sounding names who pass as Moslem in the non-Moslem U.S. but are perhaps so alienated from their roots — if indeed they have any Moslem roots and are not just misidentified — that they cozy up to the powers that be in this non-Moslem and anti-Moslem society by telling us what we want to hear.
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He did, however, remark, as I have remarked on various occasions, that the problem with the Moslem world is that it doesn't have a Pope to guide the faithful as to what Islam does and does not permit, morally.
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Zakaria then compared Islam instead to Protestantism, in which no central authority controls and provides certain guidance as to doctrine, but in which every sect and would-be leader sets itself/himself/herself up as an authority and competes for adherents.
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Zakaria himself used the example of Jerry Falwell, who was not consecrated by some hierarchy to speak for Chistians but set himself up as an authority whom all should heed, and some people (were so stupid as to) heed him.
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The world is so much simpler if you just accept that there is no reason behind why we are here, no purpose as to "what we were put here for". No God. No afterlife. No supernatural force looking out for us, waiting for us to trip up so s/He can send us into eternal damnation, or, alternatively, guiding our hand to righteousness. There's no "God on our side" — and against the other side. We don't have 100 lives, or 1,000 lives in which to achieve unity with the divine. We live only one, all-too-short life, and satisfactions come from being as good to others as we wish they would be good to us.
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Religion has value only to the extent it has nobility and wisdom. When religion tells us to kill in the name of God, we should have the good sense to back off and say openly, aloud and without shame: "That's just crazy!" And not all wisdom depends on "God".
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Tennessee Williams, the gay American playwright, gave us "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." Is that a Christian phenomenon only? Or is kindness to strangers equally a requirement of ancient Judaism, medieval Islam, and secular humanism?
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You just plain don't need religion of any kind to be a good person, tho the empire-builders of religious sects want you to believe that it is not enuf to be good; you must be reverent, pious, "holy", and seek a relationship with God that only they, and the institutions they created or champion, can serve as go-between — indispensable interlocutor — between you and God.
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Further, it is not enuf to be good and in reverential communion with God. You must also abide by certain ridiculous rules and rituals. You cannot eat spare ribs (Judaism and Islam), because some ancient fool said that the hog is unholy, not just externally unclean for wallowing in mud to suppress skin parasites. You cannot eat a cheeseburger (Judaism), because eating meat and dairy at the same time is forbidden. Why on Earth would anybody in his right mind prohibit any such thing? Well, no one in his right mind would prohibit any such thing, but a lot of loons do.
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If once you accept that life is short and all too often filled with hardship and pain, too little filled with pleasure and satisfaction, you can eat spare ribs, and cheeseburgers, and bacon cheeseburgers any day of the week; eat meat on Friday; drink alcohol (in healthful moderation); play around, mutually respectfully, with someone, of either gender (according to your true orientation), sexually. You don't need some book or some pretentious, dirty-minded, slave-to-guilt fool to tell you right from wrong — as tho any of them has the slightest idea of right and wrong, in intellectually defensible terms.
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All you need is a little bit of common sense and respect for others. The Golden Rule is pretty near universal across planet Earth, among all cultures, races, and places, tho the particular formulation, in words, may differ.
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In Christianity, the Golden Rule is a positive duty, not just to abstain from doing harm but affirmatively to do good. In other faiths, the formulation is ordinarily in the negative, that one has a duty not to hurt others.
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A New York Baha'i website sets forth these formulations of the Golden Rule from nine religions, in this sequence (oldest to newest):

Hinduism: "This is the sum of duty: do naught to others that which if done to thee would cause pain."

Judaism: "What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow men. That is the entire law; all the rest is commentary."

Zoroastrianism: "That nature only is good when it shall not do unto another whatever is not good for its own self."

Buddhism: "Hurt not others with that which pains yourself."

Taoism: "The sage has no interests of his own, but regards the interests of the people as his own. He is kind to the kind, he is also kind to the unkind; for virtue is kind."

Christianity: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"

Islam: "No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother that which he desires for himself."

Sikhism: "Precious like jewels are the minds of all. To hurt them is not at all good. If thou desirest thy Beloved, then, hurt thou not anyone's heart."

Baha'i: "Blessed is he who preferreth his brother before himself."

At end, however, it's just common decency, which is a form of common sense.
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If only we would do the right thing, we wouldn't be facing hostility from 200 million Arabs and a billion Moslems. But we won't. We will fite to the last breath against doing the right thing. And if the war effort requires us to throw our civil liberties away and let the government treat us all as potential terrorists, we will do that gladly. No sacrifice is too great for Israel.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:09 AM