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Flying while Arab
Whatever you want to call it, they're saying, what's happening now is a logical and legitimate response given our knowledge of the adversary, and quite different from previous debates we had over whether random black drivers were stopped along the highway.
LIFE DURING WARTIME
'Racial Profiling' and Terrorism
"Flying while Arab" isn't the same thing as "driving while black."
BY JASON L. RILEY
Wednesday, October 24, 2001 12:01 a.m.
Of the 19 hijackers responsible for last month's calamity, all were Arabic, all were practitioners of Islam, and all came from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East. Of the 22 suspects on the FBI's "most wanted" list of international terrorists, all are Arabic, all are practitioners of Islam and all come from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East.
Not "some" of them, or a "disproportionate number" of them. All of them.
Those numbers dictate that any sensible domestic effort to expose terrorist cells would include concentrating on particular groups in particular communities associated with a particular culture. To ignore the fact that America's enemies in this war share a faith and ethnicity--and that their actions, by their own reckoning, are ethnically and religiously inspired--would be self-deluding and foolish.
The public is already responding to Attorney General John Ashcroft's call for "each American to help us defend our nation in this war." People have flooded law enforcement with information about suspicious activities and individuals, and law enforcement has responded accordingly--some 1,000 people have been detained and more than 4,000 subpoenas issued. If there exists any hesitancy or guilt about the appropriateness of this patriotic endeavor, it derives from that unfortunate label it goes by: racial profiling.
Many topics of our national conversation prior to Sept. 11--stem-cell research, slavery reparations, wayward California congressmen--have been moved to the backburner. Talk of "racial profiling," by contrast, has not only survived the terrorist attacks but intensified as a result of them.
Before last month's events, those Americans who favored profiling were few in number, and those willing to say so aloud were fewer still. President Bush and Mr. Ashcroft had gone on record condemning racially motivated police stops, which surprised no one. To the public and the media, racial profiling was a major no-no; it evoked images of state troopers targeting black highway motorists for traffic violations in order to search for drugs.
Not much effort has gone into distinguishing between our pre-September understanding of this controversial police procedure and our current effort to pre-empt future terror strikes on the basis of all we know about the perpetrators. Instead we get polls purporting to show a shift in public attitudes about profiling, even among groups who ostensibly stand to lose the most in such a shift.
Two respected pollsters have reported that blacks, the frequent targets of profiling, are now more likely than other racial groups to favor it. Seventy-one percent of black respondents to a Gallup poll, and 54% in a Zogby poll, said they want Arab-looking travelers singled out for extra scrutiny at airports. And when the Detroit News, whose readership includes one of the nation's largest Arab-American enclaves, conducted its own survey last month, it found that even Arabs want lookalikes checked out more closely; 61% said "extra questioning or inspections are justified."
In part, what the polls speak to is the uselessness of the term "racial profiling," which has joined other muddled expressions like "affirmative action," "racist" and "diversity" in the abyss of politically charged racial cant. Regardless of what the polls say, blacks haven't suddenly decided that "driving while black" is no longer a problem that needs addressing, and Arabs haven't suddenly acquired a collective self-hatred.
More plausibly, both groups, to their credit, are making a distinction that the media are ignoring. Whatever you want to call it, they're saying, what's happening now is a logical and legitimate response given our knowledge of the adversary, and quite different from previous debates we had over whether random black drivers were stopped along the highway.
But more than semantics is at stake here, says Jackson Toby, a professor sociology at Rutgers University who's written extensively on racial profiling. "There's an important political distinction to be made," he says. "If the people who think that civil liberties violations are occurring on the turnpike ally themselves with people who call this wartime effort racial profiling, they are saying something so unacceptable to Americans in this political climate that they're killing their own case."
Testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this month, Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union complained that "virtually every secret evidence case that has come to public attention [since the attacks] has involved a Muslim or an Arab, raising the specter of racial profiling." Mr. Edgar apparently sees something sinister going on here, even though our suspect lists are comprised entirely of Muslims and Arabs. Similarly, Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. John Conyers, two liberal Democrats who had sponsored bills to address racial profiling before Sept. 11, have now decided there's no difference between the "driving while black" problem and what they've dubbed "flying while Arab."
But there are differences. The nation is at war. By all means, let's continue to debate the extent to which we want race and ethnicity employed by law enforcement in their efforts to stop lead-footed drug runners and the like. But let's not confuse that effort with the current one to prevent another Sept. 11. Doing so helps neither case.
Mr. Riley is a senior editorial writer at The Wall Street Journal.
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
'Racial Profiling' and Terrorism
"Flying while Arab" isn't the same thing as "driving while black."
BY JASON L. RILEY
Wednesday, October 24, 2001 12:01 a.m.
Of the 19 hijackers responsible for last month's calamity, all were Arabic, all were practitioners of Islam, and all came from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East. Of the 22 suspects on the FBI's "most wanted" list of international terrorists, all are Arabic, all are practitioners of Islam and all come from known state incubators of terrorism in the Middle East.
Not "some" of them, or a "disproportionate number" of them. All of them.
Those numbers dictate that any sensible domestic effort to expose terrorist cells would include concentrating on particular groups in particular communities associated with a particular culture. To ignore the fact that America's enemies in this war share a faith and ethnicity--and that their actions, by their own reckoning, are ethnically and religiously inspired--would be self-deluding and foolish.
The public is already responding to Attorney General John Ashcroft's call for "each American to help us defend our nation in this war." People have flooded law enforcement with information about suspicious activities and individuals, and law enforcement has responded accordingly--some 1,000 people have been detained and more than 4,000 subpoenas issued. If there exists any hesitancy or guilt about the appropriateness of this patriotic endeavor, it derives from that unfortunate label it goes by: racial profiling.
Many topics of our national conversation prior to Sept. 11--stem-cell research, slavery reparations, wayward California congressmen--have been moved to the backburner. Talk of "racial profiling," by contrast, has not only survived the terrorist attacks but intensified as a result of them.
Before last month's events, those Americans who favored profiling were few in number, and those willing to say so aloud were fewer still. President Bush and Mr. Ashcroft had gone on record condemning racially motivated police stops, which surprised no one. To the public and the media, racial profiling was a major no-no; it evoked images of state troopers targeting black highway motorists for traffic violations in order to search for drugs.
Not much effort has gone into distinguishing between our pre-September understanding of this controversial police procedure and our current effort to pre-empt future terror strikes on the basis of all we know about the perpetrators. Instead we get polls purporting to show a shift in public attitudes about profiling, even among groups who ostensibly stand to lose the most in such a shift.
Two respected pollsters have reported that blacks, the frequent targets of profiling, are now more likely than other racial groups to favor it. Seventy-one percent of black respondents to a Gallup poll, and 54% in a Zogby poll, said they want Arab-looking travelers singled out for extra scrutiny at airports. And when the Detroit News, whose readership includes one of the nation's largest Arab-American enclaves, conducted its own survey last month, it found that even Arabs want lookalikes checked out more closely; 61% said "extra questioning or inspections are justified."
In part, what the polls speak to is the uselessness of the term "racial profiling," which has joined other muddled expressions like "affirmative action," "racist" and "diversity" in the abyss of politically charged racial cant. Regardless of what the polls say, blacks haven't suddenly decided that "driving while black" is no longer a problem that needs addressing, and Arabs haven't suddenly acquired a collective self-hatred.
More plausibly, both groups, to their credit, are making a distinction that the media are ignoring. Whatever you want to call it, they're saying, what's happening now is a logical and legitimate response given our knowledge of the adversary, and quite different from previous debates we had over whether random black drivers were stopped along the highway.
But more than semantics is at stake here, says Jackson Toby, a professor sociology at Rutgers University who's written extensively on racial profiling. "There's an important political distinction to be made," he says. "If the people who think that civil liberties violations are occurring on the turnpike ally themselves with people who call this wartime effort racial profiling, they are saying something so unacceptable to Americans in this political climate that they're killing their own case."
Testifying before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights this month, Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties Union complained that "virtually every secret evidence case that has come to public attention [since the attacks] has involved a Muslim or an Arab, raising the specter of racial profiling." Mr. Edgar apparently sees something sinister going on here, even though our suspect lists are comprised entirely of Muslims and Arabs. Similarly, Sen. Russ Feingold and Rep. John Conyers, two liberal Democrats who had sponsored bills to address racial profiling before Sept. 11, have now decided there's no difference between the "driving while black" problem and what they've dubbed "flying while Arab."
But there are differences. The nation is at war. By all means, let's continue to debate the extent to which we want race and ethnicity employed by law enforcement in their efforts to stop lead-footed drug runners and the like. But let's not confuse that effort with the current one to prevent another Sept. 11. Doing so helps neither case.
Mr. Riley is a senior editorial writer at The Wall Street Journal.
Copyright © 2001 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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its safe to say that we in the US want more security.
so, either increase efficiency or get more inputs
but, just spending more on security isn't going to help. the FBI and CIA are already stretched thin, and it takes years before you can have a good agent on the ground doing work. likewise, local authorities are already being overwhelmed with this anthrax scare. so, the likelihood of us increasing our security by spending more on security is rather low.
the only other method is to increase the efficiency of our security apparatus. that means racial profiling. you can't have our police pretend to not know what they do know. arabs and muslims are considerably more likely to be potential terrorists then white anglo-saxons, at least in the current climate. we can't have our officers pretend that they don't know this fact.
what i find truly interesting is that the same people who are opposed to spending more on security are also opposed to increasing the efficiency of what we already have.
treasonous? no, because treason implies malicious intent. the idiots who undermine US security are doing so b/c they are just stupid, not criminal
FUCK YOU AND YOUR WAR!!!!!
Which demographic group uses drugs at a greater rate than others? It's white men. It really depends on the drug category in particular. I think the statistics show that black people are more likely to use crack than other "races" but it is still a very small fraction of the total, while they have much lower rates of marijuana/XTC/LSD use. Averaged over all drug use categories, white men + american indians win. They don't have 'west asian' or arabic as a separate category, but asian people rank the lowest for drug use.
Most of those responsible for bombings and assassination attempts against abortion providers have been white. So why aren't any of those people on the "most wanted" list?