September 16th, 2005 by Jemaleddin Cole
Jillian Bandes, an op-ed columnist for the Daily Tarheel was recently canned after it was found that her most recent editorial used quotes out of context in order to make it seem as though the Arab-Americans she interviewed favored racial profiling. But that’s not what got me.
Prior to this discovery, people were already calling for her job because she suggested that in order to make us all safer, Arabs should be “stripped naked and cavity-searched if they get within 100 yards of an airport.” In fact, she wants “Arabs to get sexed up like nothing else.” And you know, that’s stupid, if for no other reason than it’s unlikely to make us safer. But it’s not what bothered me.
What bothered me was her justification for this nightmare:
“You can debate a lot of things about post-9/11 foreign policy, but one thing you can’t debate is that taking out terrorists — or blatant human-rights violators — is a good thing.”
It’s the aside that gets me. Let’s look up human rights in the dictionary, shall we?
human rights pl.n. - The basic rights and freedoms to which all humans are entitled, often held to include the right to life and liberty, freedom of thought and expression, and equality before the law.
Does everybody see that “equality before the law” part? Sounds like she’s calling for just the opposite.
Here’s the thing: if UNC’s paper wants to publish a woman whose journalistic integrity ranks up there with Bob Novak, that’s fine. And if they want to publish blatantly racist screeds, well, it is the south. But how do you print a column where the basic point is that the author deserves to be killed? Guess they don’t teach basic reasoning skills at UNC.