You got to number three before your list broke down. That dude wasn’t a terrorist. He was a really, really unbalanced kid who wasn’t even trying to hurt anyone for any reason, agenda driven or otherwise.
If that’s the best list of non-middle eastern “terrorists” you can come up with, then doesn’t that prove the OP’s point.
Actual effective profiling involves looking for behavior patterns, (how do people respond to questions from authorities–nervous? rehearsed? other?, how do they interact with their fellow passengers, what sort of baggage do they check or carry). It will also include some aspects of apparent place of origin, age, sex, etc. It will never be limited to appearance.
If the criterion is “middle eastern males” it is a waste of time and counterproductive.
Thanks to this thread I am now in favor of arresting all cleancut, slender, fit, white guys.
me, too, and I volunteer to guard them, too.
Good luck, since all cleancut, slender, fit, white guys are GAY! 
damn. I ** knew ** there was a catch. DAMN THOSE MEDDLING KIDS!!!
Is anyone suggesting that racial profiling be the only criteria?
Which, to the extent that what you’re saying makes sense at all, is exactly the opposite of the point I believe you are trying to make. What we already live in is a state where everyone is presumed to be a terrorist. Until, that is, they’ve had their bags searched, gone through the X-ray machine, etc. What would result from racial profiling, to continue to use your alarmist language, is a police state in which only SOME people are presumed to be terrorists, based solely on how the look/sound.
Going back to the OP, what bugs me is the extent to which so many people seem to want to either argue about straw men (increased scrutiny at an airport based partially on physical appearance will directly lead to more assaults on arab americans HOW precisely?) or by trying to simplify the issue. This is an issue that, as far as I can tell, can NOT be simplified. Lay out the pros and cons on both sides of the argument, and they’re complicated pros and cons. How much individual freedom is traded away? How much security is gained? To what extent, if any, will the profiling lead to general prejudice towards the profiled? To what extent do the normal guidelines and protections of civil liberties apply in situations that are simultaneously (a) totally voluntary, and (b) incredibly high-risk?
Beats me… I just these questions deserve meaningful discussion, not just (a) waving the bloody McVeigh, and (b) “well, look, that ONE terrorist there probably would have gotten through profiling. Why, it must be worthless!”
Well, the complaint to which I initially responded was that it was foolish to use Timothy McVeigh as an argument against racial profiling. That seems to be an indication, to me, that there purports to be some validity in racial profiling. Certainly, there seem to be any number of people who have complained that we have detained or searched elderly women instead of harrassing every young male from a (perceived) MENA nation. Coulter, Hannity, O’Reilly, Limbaugh, Beck, and others of their ilk have made such complaints on several occasions.
In the context of boarding airplanes, I would submit that any profiling is foolish and that we should actually be treating everyone as a terrorist and examining all materials being carried or placed on a plane. (A few years a ago, one of those terrible MENA types almost got a bomb onto a plane, not by carrying it aboard, but by sending it along with his Northern European girlfriend whom he intended to send to her doom along with the other passengers and crew.)
It seems to me any number of people are plotting to use airplanes for terrorist purposes. Certainly, we’ve been made aware that some groups of Middle Eastern men have interest in hijacking planes… but I’m sure there are several fringe kooks of every stripe taking notes about the destruction (and most importantly) the attention that al-Qaeda garnered after 9/11. I’d like to think that such an audacious plan as 9/11 would be even more difficult to execute because it’s been done before… there’s a precedent.
If I was a terrorist, I’d be hard at work on the Next Big Thing. If I knew my demographic was being profiled, I’d do my best to camouflage the phenotypic traits (like the 9/11 hijacker linked upthread who could pass for Asian or even Latino) or even looking for new recruits (I imagine any John Walker Lindh types are in high demand). As well as “normal” people like little White grandmothers who might be duped into carrying on bombs, etc.
I also think it’s a mistake to assume that the only possible terrorists are al-Qaeda. Every extremist in the world, I’m sure, resents the attention that al-Qaeda has received… you’re only as good as your last act of terror, and I would imagine they’re all at work trying to figure out how to top 9/11. What better way than to “flip the script” with an old lady/kid/White businessman?
Bearing in mind that I don’t really have a position on racial profiling, I think this is too simple. Obviously, we should apply some scrutiny to everyone. But should we apply the SAME scrutiny to everyone? We have a certain amount of money and time to spend doing airport security, and are we automatically going to get the most safeness-for-our-buck by having a single amount of time/money/effort that goes into a typical inspection, and applying that same inspection to everyone, across the board? Maybe instead of doing a level 6.8 inspection on everyone, we should do a 6.7 on most people, and an 8.3 on a few people, and a 9.9 on a super-tiny number of people.
Or maybe not. Beats me. Again, though, I think your statement oversimplifies things.
One might argue, though, that if we’re forcing AQ to put bombs on the planes not in the hands of super-reliable willing-to-die fervent believers, but rather in the hands of ignorant grannies, or recruited-and-thus-both-way-less-loyal-and-far-more-likely-to-be-cops random dudes, then we are making things more difficult for them, and thus safer for us. And no one’s saying that the grannies and white guys get through with no inspection at all…
Yeah, cause you have to be a fucking genius to take someone hostage with a boxcutter.
My unlce who’s is a Dallas cop has a veiw on racial profiling that I happen to agree with.
Pulling over a black man because he’s driving a new car is bad.
However, that being said; If you see a group of white teenagers driving around in their new car Mommy and Daddy bought for them with ONE older black man wearing tattered clothes ridding with them; as a cop, you SO want to pull these people over because you know these kids are trying to score drugs.
Muriel Degauque was a Belgian blonde, who married a muslim, became a suicide bomber and blew herself up in Iraq. (no-one else was killed)
Abdul-Jabbar van de Ven’s real first name was Jilles and he’s as Dutch looking as I am.[Photo](http://www.ru.nl/voxmagazine/vox_online/archief/zoeken_op_nummer/nummers_(index/jaargang_5/inhoudsopgave_8/radboudstudent/) (except that I’m not that ugly 
)
He converted himself to Islam at the age of fourteen and is an Imam now.
He expressed the wish that a politician would die soon of cancer and called the Netherlands - not very original - a cancer.
Mohammed Bouyeri, the Islamist who butchered Theo van Gogh, looks cute. (not his eyes though, they look cold)
He was born in Morocco, so that makes him North-Arabic, but I have a hard time too, seeing what nationality someone has.
So: Racial profiling?
How?
Racial profiling is controversial, and we will never reach agreement.But maybe we could at least agree to use a little common sense?
how about “negative” profiling. Statistics show that there are some groups who can be presumed to be non-terrorist.
So let’s not search every single 30 yr old dark-skinned man with a beard and an Arabic accent… But can we all agree that there is no need to search 70 year old grey-haired grandmothers with southern accents?
If I were and al-Qaeda recruiter, and the US started concentrating exclusively on Arabs and Persians at baggage checkpoints, I’d look for my next batch of cannon fodder from the 500,000 Chinese, 200,000,000 Indonesian,or 8,000,000 Somali Muslims, among others.
Once the US took the rather useemly step of only letting white people through without being searched, I’m sure I could find a half dozen dudes to go wreck shit among the 300,000 or so Albanian Muslims, not to mention the Chechens, Bosnians, Kosovars, etc.
You got to number three on your list before you hit the profile.
McVeigh was a lone nut. He wasn’t a part of any organization dedicated to killing anyone. One of my biggest regrets is that he was executed on July 11, 2001. I wish he’d been alive for four more months to show him that, in the world of terrorism, he was chickenshit.
I do think anti-abortionists should be profiled. Too mahy of them think that women’s health care providers should be killed.
People bring this up from time to time, but I’m not sure it’s meaningful. I’m not sure that merely being Muslim, in and of itself, gets people to feel any specific sympathy for Al Qaeda and their ilk. Besides … wouldn’t this have been successfully executed by now?
Does AQ, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc., even have a significant number of non-Arabs in their ranks? Perhaps enough to count on two hands … perhaps … but I’m betting not even that many.
