Brown skin? You must be a terrorist

It is not a good time to be brown-skinned. The chances are more than 50-50 that airport security officials in most places will single you out. If you are a bearded, brown-skinned young Muslim male, the odds are even higher. Add Arab attire or a turban to that mix, and you might want to re-consider travelling, especially now that there is the added risk of being shot in the head by police in the London Underground.

When I was a Seattle correspondent, a Taiwanese friend asked if I had been getting suspicious looks after September 11. I explained I am a Hong Kong-born naturalised American of Indian origin and my parents were Hindu, and she sniggered: 'People here don't know the difference.' Indeed they do not, which explained why reprisals that followed September 11 included attacks against turbaned Sikhs.

I bring all this up because of something I read in The Guardian about Magdi el-Nashar, the 33-year-old Egyptian biochemist suspected of masterminding the London bombing: 'Although he attended the mosque regularly, he was not known as a fundamentalist.' The assumption being that you are a fundamentalist if you pray in a mosque.

Turbaned people are also assumed to be terrorists, which explains why New York police last week tied up and forced to the ground five innocent Sikhs simply because someone said they looked suspicious. Jean Charles de Menezes was clean-shaven and a lighter shade of brown, but British police still executed him in the London Tube. Eyewitnesses and Metropolitan Police chief Sir Ian Blair said he was South Asian. He turned out to be an innocent Brazilian. Had he been blond and blue-eyed, there is no doubt the police would have been less trigger-happy.

Rita Luna, a Brazilian, told The Independent: 'To the police, we Brazilians look the same as Pakistanis, Arabs and Palestinians.' To many in the west, not only Pakistanis, Arabs, and Palestinians but all others with brown skin are terrorists unless proven otherwise.

And there you have one of many root causes of terrorism - causes that western leaders refuse to admit, for if they did, they would be admitting they helped sow the seeds of terror. When US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair recoil at the horror of suicide bombers blowing up Londoners but coldly excuse missile attacks on innocent Iraqis as 'collateral damage', they create a root cause of terrorism.

When they condemn Palestinians who blow up Israelis but condone Israeli bombing of Palestinians, they create a root cause of terrorism.