Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Editorials: Where I rant to the wall about politics. And sometimes the wall rants back.

Homeland Security targeting sixteen-year olds?

Jerry Stratton, June 17, 2005

Yet another reason why students asked to write about current events should refuse: sixteen-year-old Tashnuba Hayder was forced to “return to Bangladesh”--a country she hasn’t seen since age 5 and whose language she doesn’t know--partially because a tutor asked her to write about Homeland Security.

The tutor, Asmaa Samad, recalled the essay as innocuous: “It said nothing derogative, nothing unpatriotic.” Tashnuba said agents seized on one part. “I wrote, ‘I feel like Muslims are being targeted, they’re being outcasted more.‘“

When she wrote that, she still believed that in America she had the freedom to write such things. But that phrase turned out to be more true than she or her tutor realized.

“Homeland Security” is quickly becoming the farce that Transportation Security has become: they spend more time and money on lots of little pointless actions because that’s easy and safe and it makes for more work and more job security.

Kicking Tashnuba Hayder out of the United States has made no one safer. It only highlights how right Tashnuba was--and others are--when they complain about the dangerous profiling of minorities.

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