“I’m proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have.”

Important note: I posted this shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack to highlight isolated acts of racism and violence against Muslims and Arabs. I find the acts described below to be abhorrent and deplorable. People who want to express their hatred for Arabs need to get their heads out of their asses and go post somewhere else.

According to the Associated Press, 300 people showed up in Oaklawn, Illinois to protest outside a mosque there. Police kept the protesters well away from the mosque, and made three arrests.

One of the protesters, 19-year-old Colin Zaremba, was quoted by the Associated Press as saying, “I’m proud to be American and I hate Arabs and I always have.”

Meanwhile a 75-year-old man tried to run over a Pakistani woman near a Huntington, New York, shopping mall and then followed her into the mall shouting that he was going to kill her for “destroying my country.”

In Indiana, somebody fire shots at a gas station owned by a Yemen-born U.S. citizen.

But the most bizarre incident occurred in Australia, where people apparently threw stones at a school bus carrying Muslim children.

A $400 Civilization Killer?

Courtesey of my favorite blog of the moment, Boing Boing, is a pointer to a Popular Mechanics article that outlines an extremely scary future terrorist scenario.

Short version: for very little money — as low as $400 — it is theoretically possible to construct a device that would set off an electromagnetic pulse capable of destroying pretty much all electronic devices in the immediate vicinity (unfortunately the Popular Mechanics folks forget to include how large of an area such a device could effect).