Apparently the profiling has started. CNN talks to Rafi Ron, frm. security chief at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, and frm FBI agent Mike German about calls to ditch all the silly political correctness and to agree that if it looks, walks, and quacks like one, it should be profiled a duck: CNN Video
The gist of what Newt Gingrich said about profiling:
We know how to identify these enemies but our elites have refused to do so. In the Obama Administration, protecting the rights of terrorists has been more important than protecting the lives of Americans. That must now change decisively. It is time to know more about would-be terrorists, to profile for terrorists and to actively discriminate based on suspicious terrorist information.
Oh, and here is Ann Coulter on profiling. She thinks the word “Nigerian” is a “warning sign”:
Since Muslims took down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, every attack on a commercial airliner has been committed by foreign-born Muslim men with the same hair color, eye color and skin color. Half of them have been named Mohammed. An alien from the planet “Not Politically Correct” would have surveyed the situation after 9/11 and said: “You are at war with an enemy without uniforms, without morals, without a country and without a leader — but the one advantage you have is they all look alike. … What? … What did I say?”
The only advantage we have in a war with stateless terrorists was ruled out of order ab initio by political correctness. And so, despite 5 trillion Americans opening laptops, surrendering lip gloss and drinking breast milk in airports day after day for the past eight years, the government still couldn’t stop a Nigerian Muslim from nearly blowing up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day. The “warning signs” exhibited by this particular passenger included the following: His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He’s Nigerian. He’s a Muslim. His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He boarded a plane in Lagos, Nigeria. He paid nearly $3,000 in cash for his ticket. He had no luggage. His name was Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
All valid arguments. Those “Others” who strap on bombs to blow the rest of us up are disproportionately Muslim and are doing so to defend Islam. Hence the source of this overwhelming assurance that the so called “rest of us” have a magic bullet cocked and democracy need not be this hard or inconvenient. In other words, trim the fat or “political correctness” off our freedoms by authorizing more powers to whoever needs it and legislating the means to profile those who fit said “pattern.” Sucker alert! It’s also a pattern a terrorist doesn’t necessarily have to, or need to, fit.
Like Mike German makes clear, fundamentally, there is no terrorist profile — “beards,” “i heart sharia” tee shirts, “Arabic names,” “a burka-rer of women,” “extremist behavior,” “country where passport was issued” and so on are all helpful in shrinking the recruiting pool. But when terror is now a service you can outsource and push comes to shove, all those tell tale signs generate “false-positives” or intangibles; can’t someone who is determined to blow himself up also be as determined not to exhibit any of the stereotypes? In case you don’t deal drugs, it’s called a “change-up.” Furthermore, if you chase after intangibles–or things that don’t necessarily need to have a fixed address–to keep up you end up going after everybody – everybody includes Americans too.
Yep, the terror suspect is a Nigerian with bad taste in underwear, but the silver lining to all this might be a failed father with the good sense to snitch on his son. He admitted his failure, he screwed the code of family and religious honor and he went to the authorities, physically, to snitch the boy out. In doing so, he might have put the first crack in the freakin’ dam of Islamic distrust. Every other mother and father of a radical, if they choose to follow Umaru Mutallab’s steps, now know what to do. And there it lies in a nutshell. There is no way to defeat Islamic extremism without the help of moderate and peace loving Muslims worldwide. By all means, profile them.