Leonard Pitts Jr. has been my favorite columnist printed in the Spokesman Review (besides Paul Turner) for a while now. He writes for the Miami Herald.

In his column for June 8, 2008 he talks about how our current mind state resembles that of the cartoon cat who:

turns to flee angry dog, steps on a rake instead, knocks himself silly. It's not sophisticated humor, but it is a visceral illustration of an abiding truth: panic can make you hurt yourself.

My title makes a little harsher analogy with our current mindset towards things like terrorism.

Rachael Ray recently wore a scarf in an online add that some people thought resembled a kaffiyeh, a headdress worn by Arabs, most notably Yasser Arafat. This caused a bit of an uproar among reactionaries and "blogger blowhards." I like the way Pitts responds to the situation:

Me, I thought the paisley scarf resembled a paisley scarf, but then, I haven't been taking my paranoid lunatic pills lately, so what do I know?

Here's the meat of the problem though:

As it happens, at roughly the same time the Guardian newspaper in London was reporting the case of one Rizwaan Sabir, a 22-year-old student working on his master's at Nottingham University. Sabir was arrested, held for six days, and subjected to what he describes as psychological torture after he downloaded a copy of an al-Qaida training manual.
Also arrested: a university administrator, Hicham Yezza, on whose computer the manual was stored. It seems Sabir had asked Yezza to print the 1,500-page document because he could not afford to.

But neither man will be prosecuted for terrorism. According to university officials, the materials Sabir downloaded were directly related to research for his degree. And get this: you know where Sabir says he got the offending manual? From a U.S. government Web site. In other words, it was publicly available and hardly top secret.

I feel like no that we've already been through the Salem witch trials and the "red scare" we should know enough to stop reacting so insanely to our fear and ignorance. Why must we shoot ourselves in the foot, or

look suspiciously at everyone whose name is not Smith, Johnson or Jones, inspect scarves for terroristic subtext, but glance the other way as torture is committed, intolerance is embraced, habeas corpus is ignored and freedoms of speech, dissent and privacy are abridged.

It's time to stop panicking. We're only hurting ourselves while our enemies laugh long and loud. There are still good people around, not everyone is trying to kill us; let's not push them away.

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