I came late to the story of paranoid Annie Jacobsen, and the delusions that led her to mistake a Syrian folk band for a chapter of al-Qaeda.

While this debacle says ugly things about how many educated, professional Americans view Arabs (perhaps not surprisingly, given the vilification that brown persons have received in the media since the beginning of the ‘war on terror’), it does have a silver lining.

Until poor Ms Jacobsen wrote the article for a small website, and various like-minded clowns and rabble-rousers forwarded it around in true Urban Legend style, nobody in authority took her claims particularly seriously.

Ideally, this means that airline anti-terrorist security is being based on intelligence and threat analysis; at worst, it means that it doesn’t exist. Either would be better than random victimisation based on skin colour…