Courage In Profiles

INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 8/25/2006

Safety In The Skies: A passenger revolt on a British aircraft shows that if airport security doesn't use profiling, the potential victims of terror will. The danger lies in people and not the things they carry.

Perhaps with the recently foiled bomb plot to blow 10 trans-Atlantic airliners out of the sky freshly in their minds, passengers on Monarch Airlines Flight ZB 613 from Malaga, Spain, to Manchester, England, became uncomfortable when they heard two men of Asian appearance talking Arabic before the flight.

Passengers already aboard told the cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded the men be removed. Some stormed off the aircraft. Others refused to board. Police had to eventually escort the men off the aircraft.

On the surface this appears to be a combination of bigotry and unwarranted mass hysteria. But dig deeper and you find a growing resentment among airline passengers to the security hoops they are often forced to jump through while little or no attention is paid to who is really likely to attempt another 9-11.

It's correct to say not all Muslims are terrorists. But it's also true that nearly all terrorists have been Muslims, specifically young Middle Eastern males. In police work, this is not called profiling. It is called a description of the suspects. When you are mugged or robbed, the first thing you tell the police is what your assailant looked like.

All the Sept. 11 hijackers were young Muslim males. So were the July 7 London bombers and the Madrid train bombers of March 2004. When the British got wind of the latest plot, they didn't try to infiltrate Presbyterian churches, nor did they conduct surveillance of Scientologists from Sweden. And a lot of people are thankful.

All the participants in that plot were, well, you guessed it.

Critics of profiling like to point out that shoe bomber Richard Reid, although a convert to Islam who frequented a particular London mosque, and Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh didn't fit the young Middle Eastern male "stereotype" of terrorists.

Nobody suggests that profiling should be the only factor in security or even the most important one. But it should be one of the factors, at least as important as confiscating everyone's hair gel and making passengers arrive three hours before flight time so their shoes can be electronically sniffed.

As Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute has written: "A stereotype in this case is nothing more than a compilation of facts about who has attacked American interests in the past and who, given what we know, is most likely to do so in the future."

Those who object to the use of profiling in the war on terror need to remember the terrorists are already using it — that is, any non-Muslim is a target. And if other Muslims are in the area, too bad. As columnist Kathleen Parker puts it, "Profiling isn't aimed at demonizing Muslims; it's aimed at saving lives, including Muslims."

Profiling is a tool — an important tool, but an imperfect one. It doesn't mean we should focus on one ethnic or religious group to the exclusion of others. It simply means common sense should sometimes trump political correctness.

And it means a 25-year old male from the Middle East may be subject to more scrutiny than an 85-year-old grandmother from Minnesota so that both can arrive at their destinations alive.