Comment identifier un terroriste ?

Le candidat à la candidature républicaine au Congrès Dan Fanelli a trouvé un moyen très efficace de se distinguer des autres candidats républicains, il explique dans cette courte publicité télévisée comment identifier un terroriste.

Il est fort probable que son sens de l'humour ne sera guère apprécié par les ligues de vertu et les journalistes bien comme il faut, mais les Américains ordinaires qui sont exaspérés par les contrôles aux aéroports entendront son message cinq sur cinq.

GOP House candidate runs TV ad calling for racial profiling

You absolutely have to see this TV ad that a House GOP candidate hoping to take on Dem Rep. Alan Grayson (D) has run in Florida. It not only supports racial profiling, but urges it as a matter of policy -- and even suggests explicitly that darker people are more likely to be terrorists.

In an interview, the candidate, Naval and airline pilot Dan Fanelli, insisted that the spot wasn't meant to suggest that those with darker skin are more inclined towards terror. Watch the spot for yourself:

(voir l'écran publicitaire ci-dessus)

In the spot, which ran over the weekend on a Fox affiliate in central Florida, Fanelli stands between a middle-aged white man and a younger, swarthy fellow. "Does this look like a terrorist?" he asks, gesturing towards the white man. Then, pointing to the darker dude, he adds: "Or this?"

"It's time to stop this political correctness in the invasion of our privacy," Fanelli says, an apparent call for racial profiling in the searching of those deemed to be potential terrorists.

In an interview, I asked Fanelli if the message of the spot was that darker people are more likely to be terrorists.
He said it wasn't, claiming that the ad's point was that people from countries like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Syria "require a higher level of security."

"You can be light and from those countries," he said, adding that the actor who played the terrorist in the commercial agreed with him.

Fanelli, who said he had piloted a flight bound for Washington on Sept. 11, when the city was attacked, added that Middle Easterners should want profiling for their own safety.

"If the people that were doing this kind of thing looked like me, even though I'm not the guy doing the terrorist thing I would want to be examined more closely," he said, vowing that he harbored no animosity towards Islam and that in Congress he would represent all religions.

Fanelli is one of a half-dozen Republicans running to take on Grayson. So it's unclear if he'll ever ascend to Congress. But this ad deserves to be entered as an exhibit in the larger argument over the Arizona law, terrorism, and racial profiling.