No Way, E.J.

But Al-Marayati is an odd messenger for the Times to have selected. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, he took to the airwaves in Los Angeles to speculate about the perpetrators. The Times itself quoted Al-Marayati in October 2001 as having said,  

If we’re going to look at suspects, we should look to the groups that benefit the most from these kinds of incidents, and I think we should put the state of Israel on the suspect list, because I think this [the 9/11 attacks] diverts attention from what’s happening in the Palestinian territories so that they can go on with their aggression and occupation and apartheid policies.

So Marayati isn’t opposed to “profiling,” after all. He just wants to focus on one particular country of origin.

 Sentences We Didn’t Finish

"I confess to feeling only slightly more rational than Misery’s Kathy Bates. I want to strap Ellen Goodman into a chair and make her keep writing columns. Goodman, whose prose has graced newspaper pages for more than four decades .  .  . ” (“To Ellen with Love,” Kathleen Parker, Washington Post, January 6).

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