Israel Matzav: Ethical profiling

Ethical profiling

Nicholas Guariglia, a foreign policy analyst and columnist who writes on Islam and Middle Eastern geopolitics, has got it right. He says that there's nothing wrong with profiling - it's just being aware of reality.

All these suspects share several common characteristics: 1) they were relatively wealthy; 2) they were highly educated; and 3) they were all Muslim. Stating this aloud does not make one a racist. It proves one to be an empiricist.

Profiling potential threats based upon what someone may believe is not racist. Beliefs, thoughts, and doctrines have nothing to do with “race” — Islam isn’t a race, after all. Our enemies are Arab and Pashtun, African and Asian, brown and sometimes white, men and sometimes women. It is their Islamist fanaticism which binds them together in their epic struggle against the West. They mean what they say and say what they mean. Recognizing this as fact is an essential prerequisite.

A wiser national posture would involve transcending phony multicultural etiquette. On the New York City subway system, there are signs imploring citizens to “remain vigilant” and “report suspicious activity.” This is well and good, but we undermine such vigilance when the federal government itself is beholden to politically correct feel-good nonsense.

But why is our government so hesitant to trust us? Haven’t we proven our tolerance and magnanimity already? After 9/11, was there any sustained retaliatory violence against Muslims? Is there much concrete anti-Muslim backlash today? Did we put Muslims in concentration camps, as Bruce Willis does in The Siege — or as FDR did to Japanese-Americans during World War II? I see Muslims every day. I’ve never seen anyone bother or heckle them. By any historical standard, our national reaction to Islamic terrorism has been tame and prudent.

Americans aren’t asking for a green light to discriminate against Muslims. We simply want security officials to stop asking Grandma to take her clothes off at the airport. The government is willfully violating the privacy and liberties of hundreds of millions of law-abiding citizens, all out of fear of appearing to undercut our own notions of tolerance and diversity — notions our adversaries exploit. Such exploitation makes profiling all the more necessary and morally urgent. Al-Qaeda has been known to use men of varying nationalities — the most recent example, a baby-faced Nigerian — in order to “throw off” our collective suspicions. By profiling suspected terrorists in an intelligent manner, we are simply keeping pace with al-Qaeda’s deadly trickery.

I'd love to see a survey what percentage of Americans would like to adopt Israel's security system. I'd bet it's even more than would like to have seen the Northwest hijacker waterboarded.

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Israel Matzav: Ethical profiling