During WWII, U.S. Saw Italian-Americans as a Threat to Homeland Security

Let's examine a few examples, using 'oompa-loompa' as an imaginary term of abuse. Shut up Alice, you're just an oompa-loompa! - not OK. Ignore Alice; she's a stupid oompa-loompa. - not OK. Bob denigrated Alice by referring to her as an 'oompa-loompa.' - OK.

It's not the specific words that are offensive, but the context in which they are employed. When you're reporting someone else's speech, it's OK to quote them accurately and in full - indeed I think it's often necessary. If we use euphemisms or bowdlerisms - such as saying 'the f-word' or 'f---' to avoid saying the word 'fuck' when reporting what someone said - the we are not only insulting the intelligence of our interlocutors, but we are softening the impact of the original statement. To do so out of a regard for the tender feelings of others is misplaced, because by implication we're saying that the offensive content inheres in the word rather than intention of the speaker, and the use of offensive words is easily dismissed nowadays by someone saying they 'misspoke'.

Let's take another example. Bob says to Alice: 'Your life is unimportant because you are only an oompa-loompa' in some public confrontation. Carol reports this on the evening news as 'bob said that Alice's life was not important, and employed an ethnic slur.' Technically true, but 'employed an ethnic slur' sounds pretty mild compared to the unpleasant experience of being called an oompa-loompa directly, or feeling empathy for someone subjected to such a term of abuse. By resorting to euphemism, the offensive nature of Bob's aggressive remarks towards Alice is significantly understated, which is a win for bob.

I think that when a public figure (qua someone whose utterances or actions are consequential because of their social reach) makes an offensive remarks such as 'You know what? fuck the oompa=loompas!' it should be reported verbatim on the evening news, not bleeped or euphemized. There's an argument that doing so spreads it and normalizes, it, and that is true to some extent. (There are increasingly common reports, albeit apocryphal, of school students excusing offensive or assaultive behavior by citing the President's well-documented model). But the unpleasantness of hearing that repeated and perpetuated has to be balanced against the value of people knowing exactly what was said and how it was said, so that the fact of offensive or assaultive behavior is not obscured to the end of deniability or dismissability.

Linguistic infantilization is but a prelude to cognitive manipulation, and the latter has reached pandemic proportions in an age of almost-instant global communication. The averred reluctance of some to be exposed to horrible words is really a plea not to be informed about the existence of horrible behavior, a preference for not knowing about the fact of conflict. Meaningful discourse on how we should behave is impossible if we cannot express ourselves honestly about how we do behave.

Your argument is basically that if the word doesn't appear in the original article, we should be able to hold a discussion of that concept that refers to the article. There is a lot more to reading comprehension than iterating over a bag of words to see whether they appear in a given corpus.

That being said, your argument is intellectually deceiving. Toddlers neither carry out acts of terrorism, neither they kill or hurt in the name of any ideology.

Terrorism by definition means to terrorise the population, not kill the greatest amount of people. Besides that, when you carry out a terrorist act in the name of some ideology, be that radical islam, white supremacy, national separatism, etc., society is called not to act upon the results of your actions but on the ideology committing the terrorist act itself. The answer to why toddlers accidentally kill people with guns is easy: they have guns available and they aren't old enough to understand what they are doing. But the answer to why do radical islamists or white supremacists kill people is all but simple.

Also as a final thought. Even inside terrorism there are degrees on morality. Sure it's bad to carry out terrorism even in the name of national identity and freedom (i.e. IRA, ETA), but at least you have a clear message on what are the terrorists' demands and how to stop it. Radical Islam (and others) don't even have these demands - unless the submission of all the western world to radical islam can be considered a valid demand.

But that's not the argument.

The argument is about if the policy put forth by Trump&Co make sense given the data. To ONLY part of the data for policy decisions makes no sense.

Consider this:

Immigrants and refugees commit crimes at lower rates than others. http://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/us-record-shows-refugees... https://www.cato.org/blog/immigration-crime-what-research-sa...

Comparatively, what is the threat of terrorism: http://www.businessinsider.com/death-risk-statistics-terrori...

I cannot speak to the vetting process for allowing refugees into European countries, however the current vetting process is a lengthy 1 1/2 - 2 year process. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/11/20/infogra...

Do our policies make sense: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/01/tr...

Where are the articles arguing that "East Asians," "Indians," "Arabs," or other racial groups are just social constructs and that these peoples consequently lack the right to control the immigration policy of their respective nation-states?