I wish I wasn’t prophetic when I wrote this:
Is it reasonable to assume that if we rely on racial profiling, terrorists will switch tactics to include racial (and gender) profiles we’re not looking for?
I’m not surprised. Terrorists may be one size fits all, but that’s going to change.
She was the typical girl-next-door _ pretty daughter of a hospital secretary who grew up on a quiet street in this rust-belt town and finished high school before becoming a baker’s assistant.
Years later she was in Baghdad, carrying out a suicide bombing in the name of jihad _ a disturbing sign of the reach of Islamic militancy.
Neighbors say Muriel Degauque, who blew herself up last month at age 38 trying to attack U.S. troops, had lived a conventional life but became heavily involved in Islam after marrying an Algerian.
Muriel Degauque was white. Would racial profiling for young men of Middle Eastern descent have stopped her if she’d blown herself up in the United States instead of Iraq? I reiterate what I’ve written in the past. Police, military, and intelligence gatherers are trained to do a job. They generally do it very well. Relying primarily on something so easily mistake-prone (racial profiling) will give us a false sense of security. That is not what we need when dealing with terrorism. I’d rather trust intelligence info, detective work, and the field instincts of a police offer dealing with suspicious activity. We’re going to win the domestic portion of the war against Islamofascist terrorism because we have those three capabilities. We’d be wise to remember that every time someone promotes racial profiling as essential to the war against Islamofascist terrorism.