December 5, 2000

Racial profiling goes global

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Last February, Canadian journalist and former United Nations employee Abouali Farmanfarmaian was stopped at the Canadian border by officials who suspected him of being a terrorist. Farmanfarmaian, whose passport shows he was born in Tehran, had come face to face with a new form of global racial profiling, in which Middle-Eastern-looking men are often arrested or harassed at borders for travelling while Arab.

Farmanfarmaian’s first name is similar to several nommes de guerre of 1980s-era Algerian terrorists, leading border officers to misidentify him as a terrorist wanted by Interpol, he writes in a chilling account in OUTPOST MAGAZINE.

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