Security officials treated ideological agreement as equivalent to support for violence.

Evidence

One difficulty with offering as evidence an ‘ideological repertoire,’ failure to denounce violence, and profiling based on presence in Afghanistan is that thousands of young Arab men went to Afghanistan, as Almrei did, and possess the signs of ideology that interests CSIS. J.P. is unfazed by the challenge of establishing who of the 30,000 Arab men who went to Afghanistan are terrorists in the making. The problem of generalizing and stereotyping becomes more intractable, but is still of little interest to J.P. when Almrei’s lawyer suggests that many people agree with Bin Laden’s critique of America, as Almrei does, without believing in his methods of violence. Confidently declaring himself as someone ‘probably using a wide-angled sense of male world view’ in asserting that few people could dissociate Bin Laden’s views from his violent means, J.P. proudly asserts that his opinion is that of a ‘White, anglo-saxon Canadian.’ And that, it is implied, is the end of the story. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the concept of profiling-by-ideology debates and how race substitutes for evidence, similar themes in the 9/11-security-critique literature.