Yesterday I meant to link to this diary entry from dmsilev at Daily Kos, which reproduces some of the reactions at Free Republic to a news story about a mostly British group of passengers who refused to board a plane until a couple of "suspicious" men "of Asian or Middle Eastern appearance" were removed. You can go to the Kos link for a large helping of the racist bilge, or go directly to the Free Republic thread for the sewage in its raw form, but here's a sample:

Unpleasant enough to fly with Islamofascists, but what of those who in our dark times keep frightening beards, and yammer away in Arabic? On a plane?

It would take them under one minute to shave their bears. To act live civilized human beings should require no extra burden on their part.

Given our recent history, people everywhere should give extra attention to people who harbor an unusual attraction to goats, or clad their women in army surplus tents.

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If I'm a Muslim and I insist on wearing a beard and a diaper on my head while I read the Koran out loud, perhaps I shouldn't board an EL AL jet.

Eventually we get to a story from a woman whose husband -- a firefighter of Puerto Rican descent who works in the New York area and volunteered for the World Trade Center cleanup after 9/11 -- is sometimes profiled. Sample response:

This is what people are supposed to do. I am sorry if your husband is harrassed, but these are the times we live in.

And my favorite:

if her husband were to buy a cowboy hat and some boots noone would ever suspect him of being a terrorist ever again.

(Excuse me: If you have a driver's license from somewhere in the New York area and you show up at a New York airport in a cowboy hat and boots, that would make me suspicious of you. Or at least suspicious of your sanity. We don't dress like that up here, folks.)

The Kos diary entry has much more -- but I went to the Freep thread and found one interesting exchange dmsilev didn't quote. A Freeper named livius tells a story of being in Spain in the summer of 2001:

On one occasion, I saw a very diverse group of people board the trains at various stations - one was a semi-military looking light-skinned ME looking man with close-cropped hair, dressed in good business casual (pressed khakis); 2 were ME looking guys who were not as well dressed, and 1 was a black man I assumed to be Senegalese, with a briefcase of the type normally used for selling counterfeit watches.... Later, I discovered that Mohammed Atta had been in that same place, at that same time, and I have always been convinced that the reason none of the investigators have been able to find out where he met his co-conspirators in Spain is because he met them on the train. They assembled one by one or two, discussed their issue for about three stops, and then left one by one.

Atta was in Spain at approximately that time, though whether he was one of the people our Freeper saw is, to say the least, open to debate.

But what I love is the response from a Georgia Freeper named ga medic:

Your story made the hairs on my arm stand up. How creepy that you were possibly that close to such a monster. I always want to think that someone so evil would be obvious, and you would be able to tell right away. I know that it isn't this way in reality. That story will give me nightmares.

This is what gives these people nightmares -- that "evil" people don't have the common decency to give off Evil Cooties.

They're not talking about the anxiety that security screeners can spot, as part of behavioral profiling. They're talking about evil. They "want to think" it's visible.



And yet they also want Muslims to dress "like civilized human beings" -- i.e., like Westerners. But wouldn't that more effectively conceal the Evil Rays?

And what do we do if those sneaky Evil Muslims start hiding their Evil by showing up at airports in boots and cowboy hats?

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UPDATE: For even more appalling hate, see the fifth comment here.

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Almost forgot the footnote: Kos link via Booman Tribune.