Racial Profiling
There seems to be renewed interest in some wingnut corners in “racial profiling” — at least in screening potential terrorist threats in airport security. Consider, for example, Mike Gallagher’s notion of a “Muslims Only line”:http://pandagon.net/2006/08/16/winger-radio-show-host-mike-gallagher-is-a-dumbss/. Or “Mac’s recent chat”:http://www.peskyapostrophe.com/index.php/weblog/on_deaf_ears/ with her stylist.
Gallagher thinks that we don’t do racial profiling out of an abundance of “political correctness,” but here’s the real problem: Although we tend to think of Muslims as Arab, not all Arabs are Muslim, and not all Muslims are Arab. There are black Muslims and white Muslims and Chinese Muslims and Indian Muslims. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was not from the Middle East and was a convert to Islam. In other words, you can’t tell who’s a Muslim and who isn’t just by looking at them.
If you only put Middle Easterners (or people who look Middle-Easterny) through more serious security checks, all Al Qaeda has to do to defeat your security is recruit people who don’t look Middle Eastern. In other words, while people like Gallhager and Ann Coulter insist racial profiling will make us more safe and get through security more quickly (if we’re white), what it really does is open a great, huge security hole.
I certainly think there are smarter ways to go about doing security. But let’s not forget that “white radicals can blow stuff up, too”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaklahoma_City_Bombing.
