Profiling is exactly what we have to do. When a policeman tries to solve a crime, he doesn’t start with A in the phonebook. When was the last terrorist incident fomented by a radical Norwegian Protestant, or a Peruvian Animist, or a Laotian Buddhist? I can remember seeing an elderly Chinese woman in a wheelchair undergoing a patdown search, and yet this Islamic young man whose own father turns him in, is not searched? OK, put us all through the ringer, but connect the dots, for goodness sake.
Well, when looking at Peru, one may one to profile for Shining Path and oh yes, drug lords apparently are interested in Peru to:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2215921/posts
BINGO!!!!!!!!!!!
2006 Article, still relevant: Why we must profile
After the uncovering of the recent jihadist airplane plot in Britain, British officials have begun moving toward this. However, politically this is an explosive issue: a British source said that the British Department for Transport “is ultra-sensitive about this and won’t say anything publicly because of political concerns about being accused of racial stereotyping.” And predictably, once a report was printed about this in the Times of London, Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Ali Desai declared: “What you are suggesting is that we should have a new offence in this country called ‘traveling whilst Asian.’ What we don’t want to do is actually alienate the very communities who are going to help us catch terrorists.” And of course, we don’t want to do that. But those communities themselves have to take responsibility for the fact that jihadists have lived and recruited and plotted in their midst, generally with no fear that their coreligionists would turn them in.
While Muslim tipsters helped expose the latest airplane hijacking plot, and that is highly commendable, all too often the wrath of the Muslim communities in America and Britain has been focused on anti-terror efforts and the foreign policy of their governments – when what is needed instead is an understanding of and tolerance for the need for profiling. But Muhammad Abdul Bari of the Muslim Council of Britain doesn’t think profiling is worth doing anyway: “If the profiling is done on the basis of race and religion, it will be wrong, it is not going to work.”
Why not? All the September 11 hijackers were Muslims. So were the July 7 London bombers. And the Madrid train bombers of March 2004. And on and on. All the plotters in the recent international airplane hijacking attempt are Muslims. All were working on the basis of Islamic theology. Why must officials continue not to notice this? To ignore this is to give up voluntarily the one thing that may make it possible to spot the perpetrators of a terror attack before it happens, and head it off. In other words, it is suicidal.