No those are the facts.
Oh, please. First, most racial profiling has nothing to do with terrorism and never has. And second, racial profiling against “Arabs and Muslims” (the latter of whom aren’t even a race) is even more useless than ordinary racial profiling since terrorists are such a minuscule minority among them. You aren’t likely to do more than harass innocent people and create embarrassing incidents.
Do you have any concerns that profiling has the potential to alienate the Muslim community, reducing their willingness to provide valuable leads about radical activities? It seems to me that treating all Muslims as suspects will foster greater suspicion of the authorities, cutting us off from a valuable form of intelligence. Moderate American Muslims form our first line of defense against the radicals, and cavalierly sacrificing that line of defense seems ill-advised.
How does racial profiling help you pick out
The Unibomber
Tim McVeigh
Terry Nichols
or pick out members of
Army of God
KKK
The Aryan Nation
The Order
All white groups and white people.
I don’t support profiling anyone. I’m just saying who they will profile if profiling happens.
In other words, the OP assumes that the US does not profile racially, and then on the basis of that assumption, comes to the conclusion that we should. But the same fact set could lead one to the assumption that we do profile racially, but shouldn’t.
Meh, forget the race crap. Your premise is a fascist police state even before the pointless profiling.
So what if you can’t get that search warrant, you know he’s guilty so kick in that door!
Search and seizure laws never benefited anyone but the guilty, am I right? :rolleyes:
Except that you’re wrong. They’ll profile according to whatever particular bigotries and political agendas they have. They’ll harass people for being brown, or ACLU, or Democrat, or Muslim, or gay, or poor. Profiling is about bigotry.
And the main political agenda would be against Arabs or Muslims (sadly considered synonymous by many) although fundamentalist Christians might get targeted depending on whose in the Oval Office (as in Europe).
An American President having the guts to offend right wing Christians? Not a chance. They are politically powerful, and therefore if anything get reverse profiling; the authorities often go out of their way to ignore threats and crimes by Christian and right wing organizations.
Governments and police forces are apt to act out their biases in enforcement. I think this goes without saying. But when you say “Profiling is about bigotry,” I can’t help but think, can’t profiling be useful simply because some groups actually commit more of certain crimes than others?
We do not live in a world in which crime-committing is neither positively nor negatively correlated with every other identifiable trait of a person. We will always live in a world in which desperate people commit more violent crimes than comfortable people do, and we will always live in a world in which men commit rape more than women do. I could go on and on but…
There is a difference between the Evangelicals who do have some political clout and those who are just loony tunes and plot rebellion and whatnot (such as the Ruby Ridge or Waco people)
Cite? Preferable something on par with the head covering ban in France. Other than one couple having an adoption blocked I don’t know of anything done by an EU government.
Only if you buy “guilty until proven innocent” as the rule. Profiling forces you to prove that you’re not like someone who shares the same skin color or style of dress. Should every white male be treated as a presidential assassin until they can prove themselves otherwise because all presidential assassin’s have been white men?
Doesn’t matter if it can; what matters is how people who profile actually act in the real world.
You presume that those are mutually exclusive categories. Violent right wing & Christian groups like that tend to be ignored until they make such a spectacle of themselves that doing so is no longer politically possible. Meanwhile, far less extreme left wing groups and organizations get constantly harassed and spied on.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_National_Party#Claims_of_repression_of_free_speech
Yes, the BNP are a bunch of quasi-Nazis/racists but they aren’t a terrorist organization and shouldn’t be subject to such persecution.
For an extreme example of profiling that was a disaster that only stoked the problems it was trying to eliminate read up on Operation Demetrius.
I grew up in Newport RI and knew a few people in bombed with the SEALS.
Perhaps the Chief could help me with something that slipped my mind during a recent conversation.
What is the nickname SEALS use for every CMDC.
I remember it being a cool nickname, but I can’t remember what it was.
Beyond that, I’m surprised he’s advocating it since the US military objects strongly to using it.
Darn, I wonder what Admiral Akbar would call this.
Huh,
The US Navy believes in racial profiling, therefore there are no Muslm Admirals in the US Navy.