The folks I have a problem with are those who are aggressive. Mere group membership is irrelevant to me. If one does not aggress against me or threaten to, I have no problem with them. Life's too short to create extra, artificial enemies, no matter how much some would like me to.
This is very reasonable and just. One wishes to deal with people who are trying to harm you, not innocent people they happen to look like.
But could it not happen that this might not be good enough?
After all, it wasn't possible to determine, on September 11, 2001, that the hijackers were going to be hijackers when they were boarding their flights. So not letting people you know to be hijackers on airplanes... that policy was already in effect, but it didn't prevent the deaths of thousands of people that day.
On the other hand, if no one of Arab descent had been allowed on an airplane flying over United States airspace, the terrorist attacks on that day
would have been prevented.
If one holds that for an innocent person to be barred permanently from flying over the United States is a minor inconvenience, while death is permanent irreversible annihilation, and thus the death of an innocent person is a horrible and unacceptable tragedy... then this seems to be an entirely reasonable precaution, which we were only prevented from taking because of hysterical extreme left-wingers who shout "racism" at every opportunity even when it makes no sense.
The sort of people who think it's "discrimination" to only allow male sports reporters into the locker rooms of male football players, for example.
The idea, basically, is that since the terrorists are willing to commit suicide in their attacks, punishing them after the fact won't deter them. To prevent a terrorist attack, we have to keep the terrorists away from their targets. But we don't know who the terrorists are. So we have to keep everyone who
might be a terrorist away from those targets.
And then the bleeding-heart liberals come along and say, well, that's
everybody, and so you would have to keep everybody away from everything.
But the fact is that while the risk of another Timothy McVeigh might be impossible to avoid without shutting everything down, the risk posed by terrorism associated with Islam is avoidable. (And that risk actually is higher, per passenger, in the case of people from that part of the world - otherwise, we could refuse to allow left-handed people to fly, in order to avoid the risk of airplane hijackings by left-handed people, which presumably we could also manage to do without.)
Besides the argument that the unfairness involved in that is miniscule compared to the unfairness of a terrorist attack to its victims, there's also the claim that there actually is justice in such a wide-scale restriction: because the Islamic world has failed to raise its children right, it didn't teach them to respect members of other faiths as equals, it taught them to think that God intends for Muslims to lord it over non-Muslims, and to fight against any attempt to overturn this natural order.
This sort of thinking, of course, comes naturally to those people who feel that no one - except a police officer, a security guard, or a trusted close personal friend - ought to be allowed in their presence with a firearm.