The other day, I wrote about how Homeland Security was harassing innocent bags of hummus. We were inundated with emails from people angry that we’d insinuate bad things about the good people defending the Fatherland Homeland.^*

But today we have evidence that shows it’s all true. The FBI has been tracking down falafel lovers in the San Francisco Bay Area, hoping to spot Iranian secret agents. Everything in this paragraph is satire, except the bit about how the FBI is hanging its security strategy on the $3.95 baba gannouj special at Reza’s Kebab Kart:

… the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists. The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area. [Link via liberal blog]

What’s next — parantha profiling? Kulfi census? I call upon all the uncles and aunties running sketchy little desi groceries in the Bay Area to fight the profiling. If someone buys pani puri, report it as gol guppe. It means the same thing. If someone buys pink dal, report it as yellow. People substitute all the time! And for god’s sake, if someone buys a Suneel Darshan flick, tell the FBI they were muttering something about airplanes and hair gel. They’ll go straight to Guantánamo, and you’ll be doing the world a favor.

The only good thing to come out of Hummusgate is that ‘falafel’ just joined ‘loofah‘ and ‘gerbil‘ as the funniest words in English.