You want to take up the issue of racial profiling in the US, that’s an easy one. Against whom and what period in the history of the republic are we talking about? Ethnic Americans have all had to endure it, at one time or another, whether Africans or Irish, Italians or Germans, Japanese or Chinese, Jews or, its latest victims, Arabs.

In these politically correct times, however, there are laws on the books designed to protect you (the Orwellian edge of the Patriot Act notwithstanding) against discrimination based on your race, religion, skin color, nationality, accent and the way you, well, just look, say, like a “shifty eyed, swarthy Middle Easterner.”

You probably heard the one — originally told in the Harvard Law Review no less, the most prestigious legal journal in the US — about the gorilla who shows up at the personnel office for a job interview. The supervisor says, “Are you kidding? We can’t hire you, you’re a gorilla.” To which the simian replies, “Watch out buddy, I’ll sue you for employment discrimination under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973.”

Fine, not much of a joke or much of a punch line (what do you expect from the Harvard Law Review!) but the thrust of the article was to argue that “facial discrimination,” as the author called it, is illegal under laws forbidding bias against an individual because of the way he she looks.

That was in the old days, back in the mid-1970’s, when conservatives could not dam the flood of civil rights that poured out of the courts, including the Supreme Court. Thirty years later, we are faced with racial profiling — not random searches at airports and subways, but blatant profiling of people who may be South Asians, Middle Easterners, North Africans, Muslims and, yes, throw in the odd Brazilian electrician as well, while we’re at it.

And never mind that you are, improbably, expecting a law enforcement officer here to play the role of an ethnographer, able to single out who is who, in a multiracial city like New York, Washington or Los Angeles.

Those who support racial profiling, including the ultraconservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, argue brazenly that it’s a waste of time going after “white” guys, say, at an airport lounge where there are all those dark-skinned Muslims who are your garden variety terrorists. They look dark, so grab the bums!

The trouble with that is that not only is it absurd to say you can spot a Muslim, who may come from any of a hundred different countries in Europe, South America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, but that you have the right to single out an ethnic group — even if a stereotype of that group were to exist — and make it difficult for its members to board a jetliner, ride a subway or drive a car.

It is annoying, degrading and frustrating. “Stop me once because someone fitting my description or driving a car like mine is a suspect in a crime and I shrug and comply,” William Raspberry, the African American commentator wrote recently. “Stop me repeatedly because of how I look and I respond with less and less grace.”

We all recall in this context what happened to a member of President Bush’s secret service detail, an Arab American, on Christmas Day, 2002, who was kicked off an American Airlines flight after a flight attendant noticed the man was carrying a book “written in an Arabic style print.” Lawyers for the bodyguard (whose name was withheld) said at a press conference at the time that “the incident would not have happened if he had not been of Middle Eastern extraction.”

There are more than three million people of Arab descent in the United States, many of whose ancestors arrived at Ellis Island around the 1850s. Since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been a backlash against these Americans, including verbal, and at times physical, assaults, the vandalism of mosques with racial graffiti, and bigoted slurs hurled at women wearing the hijab.

To be sure, the perpetrators are an absolute minority, and since their acts are considered hate crimes the authorities were quick to pursue and prosecute them. Moreover, the Department of Justice has instituted a program recently aimed at training police officers and other law enforcement officials in understanding Muslim culture.

Yes, there is a minority of Americans out there who are being whipped into a frenzy by, among others, semi-literate oafs on talk radio.

Take the case of talk show host Michael Graham (no relation to the evangelist Franklin Graham, who called Islam an evil religion) at WMAL-AM radio station here in Washington. Graham, on the air, has called Islam “a terrorist organization,” coupling that with other dimwitted, anti-Muslim observations on his three-hour show on July 25.

The station suspended Graham for two weeks, without pay, and conditioned his return to the mid-morning show on his reading a station-approved statement in which he would have had to say no more than that his remarks were “too broad” and that he sometimes uses “hyperbole” — a soft kind of apology if there ever was one.

Graham refused, saying: “I will not apologize for something that is true.”

Okay, you may think of Graham as a buffoon, which clearly he is (in 1999 he was fired from a Charlotte station for claiming that the killing of athletes was a “minor benefit” of the Columbine shootings), but he is not the first talk show host to use intemperate and insensitive language to describe Islam and Muslims, conflating the war on terrorism with their fellow Americans who happen to be of a different ethnic and religious background. And listeners call in, demanding more racial profiling — of races other than their own.

Still, let us keep one thing firmly in mind: These people are not the mainstream. To most Americans, indeed to the overwhelming majority of Americans, who are essentially decent, reasonable and responsible folk, the anti-Muslim sentiments they have come to harbor, like the anti-Japanese sentiments they harbored during the 1940s, are a temporary expedient of passion, a hurt derived from Sept.11.

Somewhere along the line, they will hammer out an inner understanding of that dreadful day, within the framework of a rational — shall way say, genuinely American — vision of who those other Americans are who happen to be Muslim, Arab, Asian and, well, swarthy looking.

Americans, after all, are the sum total of communities of immigrants who come, literally, from every country in the world.

The racism of people like Graham, however, is the root fiber of their social consciousness, their values, their mindset. That kind of racism is a false departure from the “American way,” and the violence of its articulation merely proves its moral bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, Muslim Americans in the US, because of 9/11 will have to contend with being watched 24/11.