Harraj Mann, a 24-year-old, was on a London-bound plane last month when cops arrested him. He didn’t have a gun or a bomb or anything like that. He had just been listening to the wrong sort of music: The Clash, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles – you know, the kind of music that those terrorists are all about.
Mann had hooked up his MP3 player to the stereo system of the cab he’d hailed and was listening to The Clash’s “London Calling” when the taxi driver took alarm.
What is so scary about Clash lyrics? Well, if “London calling from the faraway towns, now war is declared and battle come down” isn’t enough to frighten you, then you probably aren’t a pansy English cabbie. What would have happened if Mann had been playing NWA?
To be fair to the cabbie, Mann is from India and you never know what those Indians will do. After all, they’re the ones behind all of this terrorism, right? The lesson behind all of this is that American cops aren’t the only ones who do that racial profiling thing – and they aren’t the only ones who suck at it. And that’s really what this is all about, because if Mann was white none of this would have gone down. But it’s easier to keep explaining racism away.