[iwar] [fc:In.current.context,.racial.profiling.makes.sense]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-10-28 12:13:29


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:In.current.context,.racial.profiling.makes.sense]
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                            Jonah Goldberg
                          October 26, 2001
           In current context, racial profiling makes sense
When the Justice Department released its revised list of "Most Wanted"
criminals two weeks ago, all of the people on the list were Arabic.
This mostly has to do with the fact, inconvenient to some, that all of
the people directly responsible for murdering 6,000 Americans on Sept.
11 happened to be Arabic.
Undaunted, Hussein Amin, a widely quoted Islamic intellectual and
former Egyptian Ambassador to Algeria, responded, "Why pick on Arabs?
Are there no South Americans, Irish, Serbs, Japanese among the most
wanted?" He told the Reuters news agency, "This will increase the
bitterness people here feel against the West."
George Joffe, a Middle East expert at Cambridge University, had
similar complaints. Pointing to the pictures of the Arab criminals,
Joffe noted, "All of the indicators, the simplifiers - the head dress,
the beards, the appearance - all indicate a particular group,
associated with a particular culture. All this goes against the
attempts by the U.S. administration to de-demonize Islam."
Alas, it's all true. It is terribly unfair we can't find an
international terrorist organization that "looks like America," as
they used to say in the Clinton Administration. But the sad truth is
the people responsible all happen to be Middle Easterners. I guess we
could throw a few Norwegians and maybe a Mormon high school soccer
team on the list, but that hardly seems fair, does it?
This sort of thinking isn't restricted to Egyptian and British
"intellectuals." When Timothy Edgar of the American Civil Liberties
Union testified to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights earlier this
month, he bemoaned the fact that "virtually every secret evidence case
that has come to public attention (since Sept 11) has involved a
Muslim or an Arab, raising the specter of racial profiling."
Well, of course! Should the FBI go out of its way to investigate
Mexican-Americans just to round out the list? If it turned out that
al-Qaida was comprised solely of men with huge, thumb-shaped ear
lobes, we would be putting out a Most Wanted list of only thumb-lobed
people.
Look: All Middle Easterners aren't terrorists, but in this context,
all the terrorists in question are from the Middle East. Taking that
into account may in fact be racial profiling, but that doesn't mean
there's anything wrong with it.
Indeed, stripped of the simplistic black-and-white posturing of
traditional civil rights arguments, racial profiling suddenly makes
sense to a lot of people who opposed it just a month or so ago.
In fact, a Gallup poll finds that 74 percent (54 percent in a Zogby
poll) of African-Americans want Arab-looking travelers to get extra
scrutiny at airports. A Detroit News poll found that 61 percent of
Arab-Americans in the heavily Arab-American community of Detroit
believe some extra attention to Middle Easterners is warranted.
My favorite illustration of why racial profiling works was first
offered by the author Daniel Seligman. He points out that if everyone
knew that one slot machine at Bally's paid out 10 percent more often
than any other, the line for that slot machine would be a lot longer
than all the others - and not just 10 percent longer -because 10
percent is a very significant advantage.
As a statistical fact, under specific circumstances, young black men
tend to be involved in criminal activity, i.e. "pay out," more than
young white men do. That's why police disproportionately concentrate
on young black men, i.e. racially profile them.
In a certain sense, as I've argued in this column in the past, the
whole phenomenon of racial profiling is a numbers game. The only way
you can prove the practice occurs is by pointing out that blacks are
stopped in numbers disproportionate to their representation in the
population as a whole. So, the quickest way to get rid of it would be
if the police simply hassled more white men. Stop enough Caucasian men
for "driving while white" and the number of blacks stopped unfairly is
no longer "disproportionate."
But this current situation is vastly different than figuring out if a
young black man looks more suspicious than a comparable white guy. To
date, in the search for would-be terrorists and their accomplices,
there are no comparable white guys - or Asians, African-Americans,
Mexicans or women of any ethnicity - who even qualify as suspects.
(ital) Only (end ital) men of Muslim or Middle Eastern descent have
been proven to be involved in the terrorist network responsible for
Sept. 11.
This doesn't mean that all such people should be harassed by law
enforcement or by private citizens, or that truly suspicious blonde,
blue-eyed people shouldn't be checked out. But you have to be a fool
to willingly fish where there are no fish just because you want to be
fair to everyone.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a TownHall.com
member group. Contact Jonah Goldberg
©2001 Tribune Media

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