I think your point is valid but your story here reveals an even more salient point pertaining to Politically Correct culture (PCC), its group identity politics and the depth of knowledge/understanding resident in multicult reactionaries.

Let's be rational instead of letting our emotions govern a reaction as most PCC dogmatists do.

First this syllogism: "all Middle Easterners are terrorists" is a logical fallicy for the following reasons:

1) Not all terrorists are Islamic but all Islamic terrorists are muslim but not all muslims are terrorists just as not all muslims are arabs just as all terrorim is not confimed to the Middle east or Islam. Therefore "terrorist" is a non racial construct and denotes an immoral/criminal political actuation policy.

2) Not all "middle easterners" are Islamic or muslim or even arab. Middle easterners as an idetifying term logically is an inclusive term which understands the "middle east" is populated with a plurality of races, faiths and cultures such as Jews, Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, arabs, Indians, negros, caucasians, and sundy other subcultures thus making the term "middle easterner" geographically generic term and a non racial or ethinic identity group term.

So regardless of who is alleged to have said this it is obviously a rational fallicy to use it or take it as racial slur. To hold this to be a racial slur one has to be ignorant of the use, meaning and nuances of the english language and also largely ignorant of the subject at hand.

I beleive it was Mark Steyn who said that politically correct munticultural sensitivity is not about understanding and knowledge of other cultures, it is about presuming moral authority by simply feeling warm and fuzzy about other cultures. Political correctness and it's sibling Multiculturalism dictate cultural relativity...that all cultures are equal which itself is a logical fallacy as all cultures have warts and some have more warts than others...PCC dictates we become irrationally reactionary and intolerant to polemicists who discuss the cultural warts.

Between these two new-age rationally vacant orthodoxies, we can see how an ignorant erromious statement like  "all Middle Easterners are terrorists" can have the meaning distorted so erroneously as to hurl the source into some official McCartheyesque race witch hunting vortex.

Cheers

WLM

Is a religion the same as a race?  I suppose in the case of Jews, we sort of assume that it is - in that Jewish is seen as an ethnicity (though certainly a very heterogeneous one by most standards) as well as a faith.  I tend to think that this is mostly a product of the Nazis and their race laws as anything that Jews chose, but nevertheless, it is the case.

 Unlike Judaism, Islam actively recruits converts, and thus has members of literally all racial origins, from the Chinese-American Chaplain of Gitmo fame to the formerly-Jewish Adam Ghadan.  Thus someone who hates all Muslims might be a religious bigot, but not a rascist.  If you singled out a single group from the middle east (ie Palestinians) you could be a rascist, but then you'd be lumping in Palestinian Christians, a group that are pretty much also victims of the PLO and Hamas.

In other words, a "rascist" is someone who is saying something that someone doesn't want to hear.