Racial Profiling

As readers of my blog are aware (and I'm sure that this includes all of you!), I finished Lt Gen Michael DeLong's Inside Centcom (he was Tommy Frank's second-in-command) last week and started Michelle Malkin's In Defense of Internment: The Case for Racial Profiling in World War II and the War on Terror. I did my usual "book report" on DeLong's book which you can read over at The Redhunter.

Malkin's book is quite provocative and raised quite a stir when released. She got into a number of debates, many of which she posted on her website (which is must-reading). So far, I've only read the introduction in the book so am hardly ready to offer commentary on our policy of internment during World War II.

That said, "racial profiling" has, of course, become an issue over the past few years. It has been debated in a few areas, perhaps none more than with regard to airport security. Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta has famously refused to allow any profiling at all. Secretary Minetta and his family were interned during the Second World War. His attitude toward any sort of profiling is described by Malkin in her book

When asked by CBS's 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Croft whyether he could enfision any circumstance wre it would make sense to use racial and ethnic profiling, Mineta responded, "Absolutely not." Croft persisted, "Are you saying at the security screening desks, that a 70 year-old white woman from Vero Beach, Florida, would recive the same level of scrutiny as a Muslim man from Jersey City?" Mineta replied, "Basically, I would hope so." Croft followed up, "If you saw three young Arab men sitting, kneeling, praying, before they boarded a flight, getting on, talking to eadh other in Arabic, getting onthe plane, no reason to stop and ask them any questions?" "No reason," Minetta stubbornly declared.

This is madness.

There was an incident a few years ago wherby former Vice-President Al Gore himself was pulled aside while waiting for a flight and given a more-than-usual search. Apparently the guards were selecting people at random and his number came up. Although other passengers reported that Gore was not happy about being searched, Gore later "shook the hands of all the airport screeners afterward and thanked them for doing the jobs that they're doing and asked them to keep up the good work."

All of which reminds me of the final scene in Bridge on the River Kwai, where the camp doctor mutters "Madness, Madness!" as he walks about the wreckage of the bridge that had just been blown.

We need to restore a bit of sanity to our security. We can do this without treating all Arabs or Muslims as if they were terrorists. But we do need to take into account the fact that terrorists do tend to fit certain profiles. As Steve Croft noted, 70 year old white, black, or asian women do not fit into any known terrorist profile. Young Arab men do. Common sense dictates that security personell use some sort of profiling based on these facts. My understanding is that today they are largely not allowed to do so. Complaints by CAIR be damned.

As Malkin documents, "civil rights" advocates typically tell us that any attempt to profile will only lead to World War II - style internment. Woe be it to anyone who suggests otherwise. Malkin related how U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow was vilified by Japanese-American and Arab-American activists;

He was merely observing that adopting lesser measures that the ethnic grievance industry vehemently protests as civil rights atrocities - such things as airport profiling, targeted illegal alien sweeps, monitoring of mosques, and tighter visa screening procedures - can prevent acts of terrorism, which in turn can prevent larger infringements on civil liberties down the road.

More to come.