The offenderati are at it again. In the wake of another attack on America by radical Islamists, and another hysterically deceitful race to call it an isolated incident, we now have the “it’s unamerican to profile” people coming out of the woodwork because some people in our government have dared suggest that it might make sense, seeing as aside from one incident, every single terrorist attack we’ve dealt with on American soil has been at the hands of a radical Islamist, but that logic is lost on the offenderati.
Racial profiling sounds worse than it is, really. If I’m trying to solve a mafia-related crime, I won’t be starting that search in Greenpoint and questioning Polish people. I won’t be in Harlem talking to the black folk there. I’ll be in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, or Belmont talking to the huge Italian populations there to try and figure things out. If you’re to believe the offenderati, that’s racial profiling. If you listen to your own brain, which I’m assuming works, you’ll realize that it makes perfect sense. There’s a good chance that Daquan Johnson on 125th street didn’t rub out Louie Fingers Fallone.
The offenderati would have you believe that we never should profile anyone based on race, and yet we do it all the time based on gender, race, religion, and other factors. In fact, in the most dishonest outrage we hear, the anti-profiling crowd often supports such things as racial quotas in schools and affirmative action; the logic being if your skin is brown you must have a hard time getting into school and need whitey to help you. Isn’t that profiling? It sure sounds like it to me.
I grew up in Brooklyn. Canarsie, specifically. At the time I grew up there, almost every family in the entire neighborhood was Italian. When someone got beat up, shot, or robbed anywhere in the city, the police started knocking on doors in my neighborhood because they suspected it was mob related. In fact, when I was about 14 years old, I watched the police shake down a friend of mine because he dared to tell a cop that just because a kid got beat up doesn’t mean he was behind it and he was tired of the cops breaking Italian kids’ balls. When the cop left, he looked at me and said, “I get it. I was just effin’ with him.” Even he understood that when you’re a kid that runs with a certain “family” and you get jumped, it most likely happened at the hands of a kid from another “family.” Duh. I don’t reckon the police knocked on many doors in the East 100′s that day. Why? No Italians there. Mostly black people. Profiling? Of course, but it’s also good police work.
The offenderati will argue that profiling doesn’t always work. Actually, that’s 100% wrong. Profiling always works, when it’s part of a concerted effort and coordinated procedure. The offenderati will have you believe that when people are profiled, it’s their skin color that decides what happens. Not true, but ignoring race / ethnicity, particularly when talking about terrorism, is asking for trouble. If someone is an Arab, Muslim, or has an equivalent sounding name, that alone doesn’t constitute a reason for a search. If someone has a one-way ticket and an Arab-sounding name, that might be cause for alarm, considering 19 hijackers on 9/11 and the attempted hijacker on Christmas had Muslim names and one-way tickets. If you think Granny McDonald, who’s 90 years old and in a wheelchair deserves as much terrorism screening as Alaka Al Mabari from Jordan, you’re not just blind to reality, you’re an idiot.
And don’t say the “old lady in a wheelchair” is a myth. I’ve seen it happen plenty. Hell, I get screened every single time I fly for work. Why? Because my tickets are bought by my company using our air miles program which is in the name of the company owner. My name and my ticket’s purchaser aren’t the same = boom. Searched. I don’t look like a terrorist, I have no history of terrorist activity, I’ve never been arrested, and I don’t act suspiciously. Where does that get me? Extra screening. Maybe I should be outraged?
The problem is we’ve convinced ourselves that people like me deserve as much screening as people like Mohammed Atta. The reality is that we’re not equally likely to blow up a plane or crash it into a building, but in 2009 people are way more scared of being labeled a racist for saying such things than they are about blowing up in a plane bombing.
When used as one of multiple factors, I have no problem with a TSA agent taking a closer look at a Muslim or an Arabic sounding name. Considering that almost every terrorist act committed in my lifetime (with a few exceptions) has been committed by fundamentalist Muslims, I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t feel safer if they got an extra eyeball if they met other criteria. The fact that the guy on Christmas Day got on a plane, with no passport, with a ticket paid for in cash that was a one way ticket, and with no luggage, while being on a terror watch-list, I’d say had security been honest, they would’ve frisked this guy immediately.
Instead, they succumbed to the offenderati, let him through, and he nearly killed hundreds of people on a plane on Christmas.
But hey. At least he wasn’t profiled, right?