Tempus Fugit

In the wake of the bombings in London, the dialog about how we can prevent such attacks is again being moved to the front burner. One major component of the answer is on the tip of everyone’s tongue, but they dare not say it outright for fear of the Political Correctness Policemen Policepersons.

We should look to profiling.

“Oh no!” I hear you say. “We can’t treat certain people to increased scrutiny. That’s just not fair!” I agree. It’s not fair to law-abiding Muslims that the vast majority of terror attacks are carried out by their religious and ethnic brethren. It’s also not fair to law-abiding citizens for governments to ignore that fact.

Consider this scenario: 12 people are getting on a plane. 6 are men of European descent, and 6 are men of Middle-Eastern descent. You are required to search half of the men. Which ones do you search? Your answer depends on what you hope to accomplish. If you hope to search the people who are most likely to pose a threat, you’ll search the 6 Middle-Eastern men. If you are more concerned with making your search selection appear random, you’ll search 3 men from each group. It’s not that all Muslims are terrorists. Far from it. It’s that almost all terrorists are Muslim, so in any group of people, the Muslim male (or sometimes even the Muslim female) is the one who is most likely to be a terrorist. If you do not search the people who are most likely to be a terrorist, you have a goal other than maximizing the safety of citizens.

I’m aware that this must be very frustrating to the majority of Muslims who are good law-abiding people. They tend to get very angry when they feel that they are being singled out. That anger is good, but is usually misdirected. Why not get angry at those people who are creating the stereotype? Getting angry at the people who are merely observing and utilizing a statistical fact is pointless.

You hear stories about old white ladies getting strip-searched, or honest-to-God Senators being given the “turn your head and cough” treatment in airport terminals. And people actually praise this bullshit. Why should the searching of a Senator or an elderly white woman make you feel safe? These are the people who are least likely out of anyone to be a terrorist or to be a threat to safety. Searching them does nothing to make you safe, and diverts attention away from the actual people who could pose a threat!

Americans in particular get queasy when people are singled out because of race. The tendency is to think that anything that is race-related is racist. This is false. First off, it has more to do with geography than race, it is just hard to judge geography without race. Second, it’s a numbers game. Almost all the people who want to attack us are Middle-Eastern males between the ages of 18 and 40. Until every person matching this description is subject to increased scrutiny, it is madness to be searching anyone else. We’re not in the business of protecting feelings. We’re not the ones who decided that the vast majority of terrorists are Middle-Eastern males. It’s a bleeding fact. If we had the manpower, we’d treat everyone with increased scrutiny. But we don’t have unlimited resources, so we have to concentrate our efforts where they’ll do the most good.

If you are of Middle-Eastern descent and you are angered by the prospect of being singled out at airports because of your ethnicity, take a deep breath, and go visit the Free Muslims Coalition and make your opposition to Islamic extremism and Islamic terror heard. If you help stop terrorism, the stereotype will cease to be valid. Keep in mind, even though it may seem like an unjust inconvenience to you, it makes you safer. Terrorists have no qualms about killing Muslims who do not share their jihadist views.