Given the nightly dose of war porn being served up on TV screens around the planet, I've been wondering when we would reach peak fear - the time when everyone is shit-scared of everyone else.

I think we have reached that day.

The fear was started one fine morning in New York in 2001 when a bunch of Saudi Arabians flew a couple of planes into the World Trade Center.

That is the day the War on Terror was launched, which is kind of ironic, because George Dubbya's grand Coalition of the Billing gave terrorism just the lift it needed. Iraq went from being a place you could walk around and not be scared of being beheaded or blown to bits. ISIS arose on the back of Saddam's deposing and we are still reaping the rewards.

Fear started to show how far its tentacles reached the day Michael Zehaf-Bibeau - a drug addict and petty crook - attacked Parliament Buildings in Canada and New Zealand locked doors to our Parliament, despite being 10,000 km away from the bullets.

Then we had story after story of Muslim families and passengers making other passengers scared by either looking Arab, or speaking something not English.

The completeness and reach of the fear was displayed best when a Sikh bloke in Auckland - wearing an obvious Sikh turban - was marked as a possible terrorist because his earphone leads were hanging out of his bag. It takes a special kind of fear to do that.

But last week, we reached the pinnacle, when an Italian bloke was mistaken for an Arab and his maths was mistaken for terrorist code.

I hope no white people ever decide to become terrorists, because if these people stopped being able to identify only non-whites as threats, they'd never get to leave their houses.

 

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