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PostPosted: 12/28/09 6:48 am • # 1 
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I easily admit that the 3 incidents over this past weekend made me VERY uncomfortable ~�to a certain degree ALL airline passengers are "profiled" ~ but profiling might well have missed McVeigh and DID miss Reid ~�personally, I'm having an intellectual vs emotional response ~ Image�~ Sooz


By Faiz Shakir at 8:03 am
Right Wing Renews Calls For Profiling: 'There Should Be A Separate Line To Scrutinize Anybody With The Name Abdul'

The right wing's predictable policy prescription in the aftermath of any terror incident is to impose greater ethnic profiling of Muslims. For instance, following the Ft. Hood shooting, Sarah Palin said, "profile away." After six imams were removed from a plane in Minnesota in 2006, Ann Coulter justified profiling Muslims by arguing that it's just like "profiling the Klan." That same year, after British authorities revealed a terrorist plot to blow up planes headed to the U.S., right-wing radio host Mike Gallagher said, "It's time to have a Muslims check-point line" at airports.

They're at it again. In the wake of the failed terrorist attempt aboard a Northwest airlines flight on Christmas Day, the right wing is renewing its pleas for more profiling of Muslims:

Quote:

Radio host Mike Gallagher: "There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed." (Note: Those are some of the most common names in the world.)

Rep. Peter King (R-NY): "100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?"

Terrorism pundit Steven Emerson: "Remember, there have been so many complaints about quote, profiling, by the quote, Islamic civil rights groups, that they stopped basically profiling. And that basically led to not putting this guy onto the terrorist watch list."

Unsurprisingly, Fox News has served as the platform for right-wing voices calling for more profiling. Watch a compilation:

Broad-based ethnic profiling is counterproductive for a host of reasons. It creates a false sense of security and causes law enforcement resources to be wasted in chasing the wrong targets. Terrorists come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. John Walker Lindh was white, while Richard Reid was Jamaican and British. As the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights has reported:

Quote:

Terrorism profiling is a crude substitute for behavior-based enforcement. It violates core American values, including the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It also hinders anti-terrorism efforts because it alienates people and communities that are critical to the success of the anti-terrorism effort.

Non-specific profiling of certain religions or races amounts to a witch-hunt against a class of people, creating the perception among the larger society that those individuals containing certain suspect features (skin color, foreign-sounding names, foreign-language skills, etc) are to be feared.

Yesterday, two Middle Eastern men were pulled off a flight heading to Phoenix because passengers reported they were engaging in suspicious behavior. The men were speaking in a Middle Eastern language. And on a Detroit-bound flight yesterday, a Nigerian businessman was taken off an airplane because passengers became suspicious that he was lingering in the bathroom for too long. The FBI confirmed that the individual's behavior was due to a legitimate illness.

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/28/rig ... profiling/



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PostPosted: 12/28/09 7:59 am • # 2 
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Profiling is useful and this article is incendiary and ridiculous, as are those who think profiling means a separate security line for Mohammeds. Profiling, developing a profile based on several factors and evaluating risk, would mean the middle aged Muslim dentist from Canada would not be inconvenienced and the 23 year old unemployed Muslim from Somalia might get a closer look. The present security measures are useless wastes of travelers time with almost no benefit. Everyone is willing to give up their civil rights " if they have nothing to hide" but using risk assessment statistics and data to determine what needs further scrutiny is a racist violation of civil rights. Please can we all stop being so stupid and jingoistic? Good profiling would presumably also catch the Richard Reids and Timothy McVeighs because a profile looks at more than just ethnicity or religion.

just a rant


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PostPosted: 12/28/09 10:00 am • # 3 
I agree with queen about the usefullness of profiling.

The reason we don't stop all Abduls or all Muslims is because this is the United States of America. We can remain the United States of America or we can throw away our Constitution and be like those we supposedly hate. There will be people who hurt us again. There are people already here and there are our home grown ones. They will break our hearts. They will not destroy this country. Throwing away our principles will destroy this country. Yes, that's corny, but it's also the truth.


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PostPosted: 12/29/09 7:25 am • # 4 
I also agree with Queen on both the usefulness of profiling as well as the incendiary nature of the article and its complete misunderstanding of how profiling would really work. And, no, profiling doesn't mean you'll catch every one every time, but it's better than random searches that are more likely to miss the one you should be looking at more closely. And, yes, it should be including looking for the McVeigh's as well as the Al Quaeda members, as both are equally a concern, but should mean that the Muslim grandpa who is second generation American business owner from Detroit with nothing more than a parking ticket in his record isn't picked out of the line any more than the Baptist minister from Oklahoma. It would basically be like doing an abbreviated background check as you would for anyone applying for a state or federal job.


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