ABC's Nightline actually asked the question Monday night, "Should part of enhanced airport security include profiling passengers of certain countries, races and religions?" I dashed off the following comment:
Today's terrorists don't all have a common ethnicity or national origin (consider the Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh, an American of European ancestry). But they all share the same religio-political ideology: Islamism.
Islamists embrace a barbaric 7th-century form of Islam and a commitment to the subjugation of the entire world to those beliefs. Not all Muslims are Islamists. But without question, all Islamists are Muslims. And virtually every terrorist is a radicalized young male Muslim.
It's insane and suicidal to ignore this fact and treat Lutheran grandmothers, Catholic schoolboys, atheist professors, and Buddhist businessmen as being just as big a risk.
The trick, of course, is to distinguish moderate, tolerant, peaceful Muslims from the radicalized Islamists, and it's not easy.
But moderate, tolerant, peaceful Muslims more than anyone have a stake in helping the authorities do so, and should welcome increased scrutiny and questioning. Their cooperation will help authorities develop psychological profiles that aid in distinguishing the crazies from those who are no threat.
To continue treating everyone as possessing the same threat potential is just willful blindness. When indulged in by public officials, it's malfeasance and dereliction of duty.
