Why profiling Muslims and Arab Americans will not be effective
By Soliman
North New Jersey: The Record
EVER since the botched terrorist attack on a Christmas Day flight bound for Detroit, there have been new demands that Muslims and Arabs be profiled at the airport. The argument goes that we should not be wasting time and effort checking Grandma or the little boy with the Mickey Mouse cap because the people trying to attack us are Muslim.
But those who make such arguments do not realize that refraining from the profiling of Muslims and Arab-Americans is not just the politically correct thing to do, it’s also the correct thing to do security-wise.
After all, profiling Muslims does not work. What does work is profiling behavior.
Not all terrorists have a Muslim-sounding name, and they don’t all look Middle Eastern. Plenty of government officials, including Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security under President Bush, have said that profiling would be a bad policy to employ. Chertoff recently pointed out on “Meet the Press” that Adam Gadahn, formerly known as Adam Pearlman, an al-Qaida figure originally from California and raised by parents who converted from Judaism to Christianity, would not have been be caught using the profiling method.
And there is also nothing Muslim sounding about the name Richard Reid, the so-called “shoe bomber” and British native who was convicted of attempting to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001.
No doubt about suspect
There can be no doubt that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian citizen who attempted to blow up a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Dec. 25, should have been barred from boarding that flight, not because he was Muslim or because of his name, but because he purchased a ticket with cash and checked no bags, not to mention the fact that his own father — also a Muslim — had warned the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria about him.
The U.S. government has made the determination, however, that all people from certain “countries of interest” should be scrutinized with increased searches prior to boarding a flight bound for the United States. So be it. But scrutinizing an in-bound foreigner is entirely different from scrutinizing American citizens who happen to be Muslim. We must keep in mind why being politically correct for American-Muslims was determined “correct” in the first place.
Last year, a Muslim family was unjustly kicked off an airplane for no other reason than trying to “fly while Muslim.” Atif Irfan, a tax attorney, and eight members of his extended family and a friend were removed from a flight from Washington to Orlando after passengers heard them discussing the safest place to sit and misconstrued the nature of the conversation.
In October, six Muslim-American imams finally reached a settlement in a suit against U.S. Airways after a 2006 incident in which they were unjustly kicked off a flight after passengers reported that their behavior was suspicious. The suspicious behavior was nothing more than praying before the flight took off.
President George W. Bush himself said he was upset after learning in 2001 that one of his Secret Service agents — who happened to be Arab-American — was kicked off a flight from Baltimore to Texas on Christmas Day as he headed to take up duties at the president’s ranch in Crawford.
The problem of predictability
So should we scan Grandma and the little boy with the Mickey Mouse cap at the airport?
Absolutely. If we don’t, our security system would be entirely too predictable, and it would be all too easy for our al-Qaida enemies to circumvent it.
Let’s remember that we’re trying to bar terrorists from boarding flights — including Caucasian terrorists from al-Qaida — and not innocent Muslims, like the tax attorney and his family headed to Orlando.