Internment Camps for all Muslims

I was talking to a friend last night about internment. Apparently some ShockJock named Savage is promoting the idea of locking up all Muslims in the United States and releasing them one at a time once their innocence has been proven.

My first though was: I don't like shock jocks, and I don't like the idea of internment. (My girlfriend is Japanese, so there is the history, and I am Muslim, so the idea of being jailed wasn't terribly appealing.)

Then I thought about it and realized I am opposed to the idea also on less selfish, more reasonable basis. Here they are, in order:

1. The whole freedom thingy. I am not opposed to racial profiling and I don't know where we ought to draw the line on profiling, but I do know that jailing an entire population for no reason other than their race/religion certainly falls well over the line.

2. We don't need to send all Muslims to jail because we don't need to track all Muslims. We only need to track a certain group of people from a certain background (probably way less than 10% of Muslim population in North America.) That comes out to what, 20, 30 thousand people most? Let's spend the money needed to identify them and let's track what they do for a while. My brother, who is 16 and is the least political person in my family, is on such a list. Every time he goes into the United States he has to check in with DHS and every time he leaves he has to tell them he is leaving. (I, on the other hand, who have been flying back and forth in the states at least once every other month for the past three years am not on the list. Go figure.) When CSIS started they used to track every single student council president in the country! If they have the resoruces to track how Brock University's student council voted on extending the budget for Brock's sexual health resource centre, I'm sure the NSA/CIA/FBI have the resources to track the "high risk" individuals.

3. Even if internment was the best way to deal with terrorists in the United States and even if it wasn't an afront to liberty, it would still be treating the symptom. The disease is Islamic Fundementalism. That's what we need to deal with and that's what we need to deal with quickly. We need to liberate these countries where these terrorists are brainwashing the next generation of terrorists.