What do these infamous individuals have in common: Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Kaczynski, Timothy McVeigh and possibly mailbox pipe-bomb suspect, Lucas John Helder?
Answer: All allegedly caused injury and/or death to innocent citizens (Helder’s guilt is yet to be proven in court). All waged, or are accused of waging, a wacky, homegrown, private terrorist war, except Dahmer, a psycho oddball of the Hannibal Lecter sort, with no political agenda.
What’s their profile? All were or are native-born white men of “typical American” lineage–i.e., of European ancestry, which is to say, among the privileged class, to whom assumption of innocence, even if temporary, is a given.
Members of minority groups suffer the opposite assumption: They’re routinely taken to be guilty until proven innocent. (This despite court rulings against racial profiling, the product of such assumptions, which taints our justice system.)
Even a federal agent of Arabic ancestry on official business was summarily removed without probable cause from an airliner on U.S. soil not long ago and questioned as a terror suspect.
How many more homegrown terrorists must the nation suffer before Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft issues a profiling alert and a preventive detention directive for sandy-haired, native-born white men, as he has for what a majority of Americans consider swarthy types who fit a Middle Eastern profile?
