Danielle Crittenden over at FrumForum has the worst defense I've read of Juan Williams' "being afraid of Muslims isn't bigotry" argument. First, she cites an airline employee, engaging in an obvious example of hindsight bias, for failing to prevent the 9/11 attacks by clearing several of the hijackers -- none of whom, as Crittenden notes, were wearing "Muslim garb." Then, she "proves" her point by spending the next couple hundred words recounting a painfully sad experience in which she panics over the presence of several Arab men who are getting on the same flight she is. They are doing terribly suspicious things like "reading an Arabic newspaper" and being "dressed in the modern Atta traveling fashion of jeans and t-shirts."
When one of them "fell to their knees and began elaborately praying to Mecca," Crittenden immediately decides she's not getting on the plane. She adds that one of them was "acting twitchy," after all, although it's possible he was just annoyed at the white-knuckled woman who wouldn't stop gawking at him. She informs a French security officer, whom she describes as possessing "a girth that suggested he enjoyed his duck confit and lunchtime Bordeaux as much as his other fellow citizens of the Republic," because there aren't enough cartoon stereotypes in this story yet. He assures her the flight is safe, but she insists on getting another ticket.
I'm probably not spoiling much if I tell you that the plane takes off and doesn't explode. Rather than realize this proves the folly of assuming every Muslim-looking person you see in the airport on a day you happen to be getting on a plane might be a terrorist, she decides this means that Williams is right:
The next day we had a pleasant flight home. And the flight we had rejected landed without incident. So, did we do the right thing?
Certainly every one of us acts self-protectively, weighing the risks of any given situation. I have never since refused to get on a plane for fears of another passenger—but then, I've never been confronted again with such suspiciously acting travelers on a flight that had recently been under terrorist threat.
Now, nearly seven years later, and in the wake of the Juan Williams incident, I ask myself: Would I make that same decision again?
Without question. And I hope I would still have the guts to report a troubling passenger to an airline clerk without fear that I might be branded racist.
Fortunately, most people in the world aren't this crippled by fear, because one could imagine the havoc merely a dozen Crittendens a day could wreak on daily air travel, where thousands of Arab looking people, many in "Muslim garb," use commercial airlines without incident. It is that haystack in which security professionals have to find an infinitesimal number of needles, a task for which racial profiling proves no more accurate than those random searches everyone hates.
Aside from inadvertently obliterating the case for racial profiling, Crittenden's post isn't so much an argument that being scared of Muslims isn't bigotry as it is a defense of anti-Muslim bigotry. As Andrew Sullivan pointed out over the weekend, in 1986 Williams himself knew the difference, writing that "common sense becomes racism when skin color becomes a formula for figuring out who is a danger to me."
I'm sure many people have had experiences like Crittenden's, although most probably decide that the cost of buying a new plane ticket isn't worth it. That doesn't make it any less silly to assume every Arab or Muslim you see in an airport is a terrorist. You were not bitten by a radioactive spider, your irrational fear of Muslims is not your Spider-sense tingling. If anything, a panicked reaction to Muslims in general will prevent you from identifying and reporting actual suspicious behavior.
