So should monitoring of Muslim groups and their communities and increased surveillance of activities be considered and actually endorsed since the majority of terrorism is somewhat derivative from their people?
Wouldn’t it be logical to take punitive steps to ensure the nation is safe from attack by ensuring a community or group of people are focused upon to prevent radical Islamists from using the community as a stepping stone in commiting more attacks?
I have no opinion on this, I don’t know yet whether it could be right or wrong, but it is something which could produce some worthy opinions.
Collective punishment, eh? I’m sure this woulda gone over real well after the OK city bombing. Or does it only apply to those troublesome minorities?
Sacrificing civil rights for security is wrong. Yes, running a nation is easier as a dictator repressing minority groups and the poor. Does that mean it should be done? Hell no.
There’s been some degree of profiling going on for the last 3+ years. Can we say it’s prevented a single attack or done any good? Likewise, despite the fact that you’ve found one historian who says the internment of the Japanese was a good thing (I love it when they play the “I’m being repressed” card), can we point to any benefits from that either?
Perhaps there is data to support the idea that profiling and internment are good things, but I strongly doubt it and I dare say Ryan_Liam should be the one to provide it. Also, Ryan, please note that the FBI has concluded that the airplane/laser thing has nothing to do with terrorists.
Remember Richard Reid, the shoebomber, only unsuccessfuly because of alert passengers? How would racial profiling have helped pick him out?
Decades of antiterrorist activity in Britain have proven that blanket monitoring is utterly useless. Any valid intelligence gained is swamped by the immense volume of irrelevant waffle. Even the pre-9/11 warnings were lost, because there was so much else going on. Monitoring every Muslim means you can’t monitor any of them effectively.
Richard Reid, together with Mohammed Atta, Zacharias Moussaoui, Al-Zarqawi, Al-Zawahri, al-Fuckedinthehead and the supreme goofiness Bin Laden himself, have this racial feature in common: they’re all ugly as toad butts. How about we profile on ugliness?
Anyway, I don’t suppose anybody think racial profiling (or any other kind of profiling; sex, age, nationality, etc) is going to be a 100% accurate or supplant every other policing technique, just that if it on average helps policing be more effective by catching relative more buggers, then it’s worth the thought. And let’s get real. When looking out for potential terrorists, it makes good sense to be more vigilant with men than women, young adults than old or children, Arabs than Inuits, Muslims than Mormons. That doesn’t mean that any old female Inuit Mormon should automatically be waved through the gate just that perhaps on average a young Danish male skinhead with swastika tattooed on his forehead merits more attention.
I suspect there’s already a great deal of racial profiling going on, but that the politicians, like on many other controversial political subjects, have opted to stay mum and let the lieutenants take responsibility and occasional fall when the dirty truth that everybody knows is all around is displayed.
El-Al has, despite many attempts, managed to avoid any terrorist attack for many years. I don’t know if they use racial profiling or whether their experience could be reproduced on a larger scale. Probably not. But maybe they could teach us something.
Well the whole idea of profiling is narrowing the suspects, e.g. trying to avoid blanket monitoring. Picking a complete random 10% of the people embarking on a plane for further investigation would be blanket monitoring.