Nick George, a senior at Pomona College, in California was traveling back to college when he was stopped by security officials for having Arabic flashcards in his backpack.  TSA officials claim that he was stopped by behavior identification specialists before they searched his bag, however, George was kept in custody for several hours and the questions surrounded the Arabic flash cards, not his behavior before he reached security.

He was first stopped because of his stereo speakers that were sticking out of his backpack.  A search of his bag revealed the Arabic flash cards and the several hours detention.

He figures it didn’t help that his passport had stamps from Jordan, where he’d studied a semester, and Egypt and Sudan, where he’d gone backpacking.

And among his 200 flash cards were words like “terrorist” and “explosion.” He was learning to translate the Arabic-language news network Al Jazeera.

So, instead of thinking this kid has two, supposedly, bad words out of 200 and asking what’s up with the cards, the TSA screeners jump to conclusions.  Simply asking what the cards were for would have settle the situation without needing to arrest George.

“I understand I might warrant a second look,” George told me. “They should have taken me aside, seen I had a legitimate explanation and a student ID and that I was carrying nothing illegal, and waved me on.”

They were polite, George said, and asked why he studied Arabic, why he’d been in the Middle East, whether anyone had ever asked him to join a terrorist group, whether he was “Islamic,” whether he’d joined any Islamic or Communist (yes, Communist) groups on campus.

What the hell does communism have to do with this?  Are communists now suddenly thrown into the terrorist category too?

“They told me their job is more an art than a science,” George said. “They come in and decide whether there’s a legitimate threat, and in my case, they decided I was not a threat.”

George feels that he was treated like a criminal because somebody didn’t like the flash cards. He wasn’t injured or psychologically scarred, just ticked off.

But Liberati said that it was the stuff that the TSA found in George’s backpack and wallet that really aroused their suspicion: the Arabic flash cards with troubling words, a card that had George’s name and Arabic script, and the longer hair in George’s driver’s license and passport photos than his current clean-cut appearance.

That’s “an indicator sometimes that somebody may have gone through a radicalization,” Liberati explained.

My hair is shorter than it is on my passport, driver’s license, and work ID badge.  Does that mean I’ve gone through some sort of radicalization?  No, it means I got a haircut!

Nick George was solely detained and arrested because someone didn’t like his Arabic flash cards.  Behavior had nothing to do with it.  Ignorance did.