No halal soup for you
The U.S. is insisting that Europe continue sharing reams of passenger data for flyers entering the U.S.:
Under an interim accord between Washington and the European Union, data that overseas passengers routinely give airlines — address, credit card, passport, phone and other information — is being used for screening on arrival at American airports. But the accord expires July 31…
Gaining access to data on British citizens of Pakistani origin has been a priority for Washington since the 2005 London transit system attack… The British home secretary, John Reid, who was at the conference, said he was “utterly opposed” to screening based on ethnicity… [Link]
Surprisingly, the data shared even includes airline meal requests:
… along with basic data, airlines share such things as passengers’ food preferences — for example, orders for halal meals — and that this could be used to single out Muslim passengers. [Link]
I dunno about you, but I’m ordering Hindu vegetarian from now on. Or kosher. Or free-range Baha’i parsley.
But seriously, this is exhibit A in the stupidity of trying to profile based on irrelevant, extraneous factors:
“We have a policy against racial profiling,” Raymond Kelly, New York City’s police commissioner, told me… “It’s the wrong thing to do, and it’s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country…
“You think that terrorists aren’t aware of how easy it is to be characterized by ethnicity? … Look at the 9/11 hijackers. They came here. They shaved. They went to topless bars. They wanted to blend in. They wanted to look like they were part of the American dream. These are not dumb people. Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts…”
[Fixing the pit bull problem] would have required… a more exacting set of generalizations to be more exactingly applied. It’s always easier just to ban the breed. [Link]
on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007, 7:25 pm in Food, Humor, Issues › 
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Screening the Asians from those islands is a proper thing.
If they are having halal haram jalil or jalal its a small part.
But smarter
Listen to this story about my last BA meal request (in which I subconsciously subvert any Muslim profiling efforts). I was raised Muslim but eat mostly veg now (though I can’t seem to give up fish). I’ve been in the habit of ordering the Hindu vegetarian meal for years now when it’s available. My Dhaka-London flight served me a tasty rice/daal/veg dish, but London-Dhaka got me a tray marked “Halal” and a chicken tikka masala dish. I returned it pointing out that it was a halal meat meal, perhaps a Muslim meal. They returned with another tray, with the Halal sticker torn off, and the same tray of chicken tikka masala. I again refused the meal asking why I wasn’t being given a vegetarian meal. They came back a third time this time with a dish that could have been vegetarian except you couldn’t see it for the cheese. I asked what happened to their Hindu vegetarian meal (I have to admit I wanted brown people food, not white people food). They told me that there was no such thing as a Hindu vegetarian meal. That they only had a Hindu meal, and that meal was the first meal I had been given: the halal chicken meal. I was flabbergasted. How can you serve a practising Hindu a halal meat meal??? Since I’m not Hindu or Muslim, I was more hungry than offended. My aunt thinks that they stock up on the correct veg meals when exiting South Asia, but not so much when returning. I haven’t yet written BA, but I will.