SFPD chief in trouble for asserting that Arab Americans could bomb Hall of Justice

[alp227]

A breakfast to tout the importance of passing an earthquake-safety bond measure on the June ballot wound up sending shock waves through San Francisco's Arab American community after Police Chief George Gascón made controversial remarks about terrorism.

Gascón reportedly said the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. is susceptible not just to an earthquake, but also to members of the city's Middle Eastern community parking a van in front of it and blowing it up.

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Despite some reports to the contrary from those in attendance, Gascón on Thursday said he never referred to Middle Easterners or Arab Americans.

He said he instead singled out those from Yemen and Afghanistan as posing potential terrorism risks - especially in an iconic city like San Francisco with large numbers of residents from those countries. He admitted to saying they could park a van in front of the Hall of Justice and blow it up.

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Ali Altaha, a member of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce who owns a small engineering firm in the city and was at the breakfast at the Ferry Building's MarketBar, said the chief should be fired.

"He basically said there's a large Arab American community in the Bay Area, a lot of Muslims, and because of terrorism, they need to be very careful," Altaha recalled. "It was very degrading, very inappropriate for a city official to make comments in this manner. ... I felt he was trying to sell terrorism as a commodity to justify his position or funding for his department."

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/26/MND71CLCDG.DTL&feed=rss.bayarea

Did it never occur to chief Gascon that non-Arab terrorists exist? Think about the guy who flew his airplane into the Austin, Texas IRS building earlier this year, the guy who blew up the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995 and killed about 100 people, and the guy who bombed the Atlanta Olympics park in 1996 and eluded capture for about 7 years while someone else wrongly was censured.