Yeah, right

The paranoid “AY-rabs are gonna get you” crowd just doesn’t give up… especially when they can get a two-fer and throw scary Latin Americans into the brew.

Exhibit A is the newest “threat” making the rounds… courtesy of the otherwise reputable Federation of American Scientists (which has a strong pecunary interest in weapons research and development) … from “Open Source Center” (which is a propanda organ for the U.S. intelligence community) on the HUMONGOUS threat of … get this… Bolivian Muslims.  All 1000 or so of them (including minor children), which, as El Duderino calculates, words out to about 0.001 percent of the Bolivian population.  The Bolivian muslims, according to the report might be “susceptibility to foreign Islamist influence”… yeah, there’s an Imam from Argentina, and a La Paz doctor who was born in Pakistan.

Exhibit B, courtesy of the never-reputable Washington Times, is an EXCLUSIVE: Al Qaeda eyes bio attack from Mexico” (insert several exclamation points here).  While the Washingon Times has enough journalistic integrity to note that

[United States] officials, who spoke only on the condition they not be named because of the sensitive nature of their work, stressed that there is no credible information that al Qaeda has acquired the capabilities to carry out a mass biological attack although its members have clearly sought the expertise.

Yeah… some guy in Whothefuckknowsistan made a “recruiting video” for the wannabes saying “we’re looking for a few really stupid guys” who are gonna carry an as yet undeveloped instantly lethal anthrax produced at non-existent laboratories in a suitcase — without somehow kiling himself (and everyone around him) half-way around the world, sneak into Mexico by some yet to be determined means, cross the U.S. border (somehow), meet up with crazy right-wing militia men who hate Jews more than Arabs (or that’s the plan) and … still not managing to kill everyone as they cart around this battered suitcase of death… then spread “anthax confetti” somewhere or another.  Pretty convincing plot, no?

Every once in a while, you run across paranoids talking about arabs crossing the U.S. Mexican border, usually with the breathless very scary additional information that the Arabs spoke Spanish.  Like, oh…  Carlos Slim, an Arab-Mexican, who crosses the border quite regularly for nefarious doings like board meetings of the New York Times Corporation.

There are a lot of Latin Americans of Arab descent, and — given the near impossibility for even political refugees from Arab nations to receive residency in the United States,  recent Arab immigrants in Mexico and other Latin American countries sometimes are planning (and sometimes do) irregularly immigrate into the United States.

Ay-rab terrorists are a perennial favorite of the paranoid right wing in the United States., but you have to wonder whether the “officials” were not named because they were the same guys who tipped off Bill Gertz of the Washington Times back in October 2004 that Chechen terrorists had entered the United States.  Of course back then, Chechens were in the news, and still had cachet.