Do you think Americans are threatened by Islamic terrorism? If we are, don’t you think that in trying to prevent Islamic terrorism it is proper for the police to consider whether someone is actually Islamic? If so, what exactly are you condemning when you condemn “profiling”?
Here is my response to him, which I left in his comments section at the blog:
Andrew --
This seems like a reasonable assertion at first, until one thinks of two points:
The overwhelming majority of Islamists are not terrorists. This is not a minor point -- it is at the heart of American civil rights that you do not target a minority group as a whole based on the actions of a few. In this case a few that amounts to, what, .00001% of all American Muslims?
But let's say that we are not concerned with the niceties of civil rights law. Then there is the other problem:
I'll gladly trade you racial profiling at, say, airports only if you will grant me racial profiling of white men in all federal buildings. Why? Because the second largest terrorist attack in United States' history was undertaken by white men in Oklahoma City, and their intentions all along were to do far more than attack that one building -- some, indeed, are still operating, waiting to kill innocents every bit as much as Jihadists. Selective racial profiling against some terrorists seems inefficient. It seems racist. It seems dumb.
But again, I'll give you all Muslims if you'll give me all white men. We won't be any safer, but it can allow the folks over at NRO to think they are clever and reasonable. [Note: I included this last sentence before I realized that McCarthy was not citing someone else's argument but rather this was his own piece.]
But let me take my point further. Perhaps the largest sustained, if not in any real way coordinated, campaign of terrorism in the United States was the lynching of black men for crimes real and most often perceived from the late-19th century well into the twentieth. Today, as far as internal threats go, a whole array of white supremacist and anti-government types still function with malice aforethought (Think Eric Rudolph). So if racial profiling is good for the goose, etc. But of course it would be irredeemably dumb (not to mention utterly ineffective and inefficient) to target all white men who enter federal buildings or attend major sporting events. It would not make us any safer. And of course it would never happen. But why do such inefficiencies and ineffective solutions not give conservatives pause when they posit them for minorities? Forget the loathesome racial ramifications. There is no indication that such an approach will work.
Now do not get me wrong -- if, say, we have intelligence indicating that a Muslim male might be targeting a major east coast airline on November 8, sure, it makes sense to heighten security for airports. That would not necessarily be racial profiling any more than it would be racial profiling to stop a black man in the immediate wake of a crime that witnesses identify as being carried out by a black man. But blind trageting of groups, or targeting based on intelligence so broad as to be useless (and remember, this administration averred that intelligence that indicated that terrorists were looking to hijack airplanes and fly them into large buildings was not actionable -- they set the bar, folks, not me) would be not only counterproductive in the war on terrorism, but would subvert many of the very values that make us better than the very real bad guys.
Incompetence and racism -- this cannot possibly be a significant part of the plan to make us safer. Can it?
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