Will the U.S. ever get beyond Political Correctness to the point of being willing to racially profile Arabs/Muslims at airports, so the TSA issues will cause less hysterical outrage?
I sure hope so, because until they are willing to profile, people will B and M about the “loss of dignity” of being patted down and/or scanned.
As soon as it’s proven that only Arabs/Muslims commit acts of terrorism, that day will come. So the answer is never.
Yeah, it’s political correctness. Not something like the Constitution which prohibits racial profiling.
Tell me, since Muslim isn’t a race, how do you “racially profile” Muslims?
And why do you propose only targeting Arabs? Aren’t you worried about Persians, Afghanis, Somalis etc?
Or are they all Arabs to you?
Don’t forget the Pakistanis (Times Square), the Indonesians (Bali bombings), the Haitians (Sears Tower Plot), the Caucasians (Jihad Jane) and the Latinos (Jose Padilla).
Excellent, fair point, Shiny!
My question, I guess then, is: “Are we willing to be un-PC in looking at people from the Middle East and regard them with legitimate suspicion because it WAS MIDDLE EASTERN MUSLIMS who slaughtered 3,000 innocent Americans!” (And Yes, I acknowledge a % of them were Muslim)
The amount of people killed in the 9-11 attacks is not relevant to this issue. What we are talking about is how to screen for security threats at the airport. The underwear bomber wasn’t an Arab Muslim, he was a Nigerian Muslim. Your screening system would miss him.
Furthermore, I see no practical way to screen solely for Arab Muslims. We don’t put a stamp in your driver’s license that says if you are Arab or a Muslim. The screeners at the airport need some concrete way to identify who is a potential threat.
So, can you lay out for us the concrete criteria which a screener is going to use to identify someone as an Arab Muslim, that doesn’t let other security threats (such as a terrorist who is a Latino or Caucasian Muslim) slip through, and which doesn’t snare up people who are not Arab Muslims?
Actually it woudn’t. He was already on the TIDElist.
Profiling isn’t just looking at one aspect of a person. It’s a combination of individual and unrelated pieces of information that when combined add a higher degree of probability to potential suspects.
If a bank is robbed by an older white male with a mohawk riding a bicycle then police eliminate children, blacks, women, car drivers and bald people when searching the immediate area.
My point was more that you can’t racially profile “Arabs” because the surrounding people are both physically and culturally indistinguishable and just as “untrustworthy” as those “Arab terrorists” are.
Are you saying the TIDE list is a list of Arab Muslims? The criteria which is used is secret, but I assume it’s based on some type of behavioral profiling. Obviously, not every single Arab Muslim is on the TIDE list. The OP did not mention behavioral profiling at all.
The OP is advocating some type of racial or religious profiling. The OP did not mention other types of profiling.
What does this have to do with racial or religious profiling?
Do you also support targetting Celtic Catholics, based on the fact that Timothy McVeigh was a Celtic Catholic?
If not, why not? If we are targetting based on religion and minor racial groupings then why not Celtic Catholics?
If they’re visibly Arab Muslim, we can just shoot them in the head.
Your question is asked so poorly it sounds like a plant from a liberal-minded do-gooder anxious to show bias and ignorant on the part of folks who think background profiling is much more effective than just looking for weapons. I don’t think you meant it that way, though, and it’s a legitimate question.
Background profiling by well-trained experts is much more effective than blind random weapon searches. In today’s politically correct climate I don’t think it will get much traction. The politically correct opinion is that we are all equal, all equally at risk for being terrorists and the only reasonably way to apply screening is to apply it equally–and therefore randomly. This is patent nonsense, but it reflects a sincere desire to be “fair.”
There are a lot of horrible people who aren’t Muslims and a lot of Muslims who aren’t terrorists. Right now though, the largest risk to airplane travel comes from a very large subset of Muslims who consider themselves in a Holy War and who wish to use the mechanism of downing an airplane as a specific weapon in that war. There is no current and credible evidence that other religious groups currently seek that particular means to wage their struggles. If there were such evidence, that category should certainly be added to the list of profiled travelers.
It would add a layer of effectiveness in safety screening to have an expert screen every airplane traveler personally. Such a screening might include, for example, a one or two sentence query with more invasive screening for individuals who meet profiling criteria based on such things as country of origin, apparent religious affiliation (Muslims in particular at the present time) or fervor, other background information, behaviour, dress, and any number of other profiling criteria which help select out subgroups consider to be likelier terrorists.
Part of the struggle we have as a functioning society is the cost of such “profiling” elsewhere, and those who demand it not be done have a legitimate concern that the larger cost of singling out people who are likely to be totally innocent is not worth it since it generates resentment and division. I do not agree with that position but neither is such a position devoid of reason.
Yours is an arguable position, though it appears to ignore the international dimension of air travel. Non-muslim Americans might be happy that muslims are singled out for special treatment in American airports, safe in the certain knowledge that the US government would never abuse that responsibility. Much harder for say the French government to employ similar measures at CDG for flights to the US. And if some French citizens are getting a real hard time at JFK, then there will be irresistable pressure for similar measures to be taken against US citizens at all European airports. When you travel through foreign airports, do you really want to have to stand in the long, slow line outside in the rain, next to the public road underneath a big sign saying “These are the Americans”?
Racial profiling would certainly not have helped pick up half black Jamaican, half white English shoe bomber Richard Reed.
What would have caught Reed would be some really good intel on the asshole. Get the intel by whatever devious means are legal. But he would have gone right through if the TSA were putting the majority of its resources into profiling on a race/religion combo, as would many of the other high profile Al Qaeda attackers mentioned above. ETA: in other words, think outside your own borders, with particular regard to the international nature of air transport.
(Also, if Mid-East Muslims were singled out, what the hell are you going to do with all the commercial flights to and from Saudi, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Emirates, etc.?)
I didn’t realize that a large segment of Celtic Catholics have declared war on us.
Please provide evidence that “background profiling by well-trained experts” at airports is “much more effective than blind random weapon searches” by TSA staff.
As with all these debates, I suspect that you will not bring any evidence, just keep making outrageous claims.
Hysterical outrage?
Having a woman remove her prosthetic breast so the TSA rent-a-cops could examine it isn’t grounds for outrage?
Rupturing a bladder cancer survivor’s bladder bag after he told them to be careful isn’t grounds for outrage? Then making him board the plane soiled isn’t grounds for outrage?
Feeling up a 7 year old boy in front of the world isn’t grounds for outrage?
Where exactly is the hysterical part in the above outrage?
I don’t believe it is political correctness to not profile a particular group. It is discrimination to do so. It is a very small minority of these groups that are criminals or terrorists and so it is unfair and in fact against human rights to target them.
It’s better than “harass brown people and left wingers”, which is what we’d actually get. We’ve already had a taste of it with the “No Fly List”, which has included people for belonging to such dangerous groups as the Quakers and the ACLU. Forget any nonsense about “background profiling by well-trained experts”; even if you are right about it being a good idea, that isn’t what will happen.