Taking Osama bin Laden at his word is a good place to start in fighting terrorism
Heather Mac Donald:
Call it the "Colbert King theory" of antiterror investigation. Washington Post columnist King has accused fellow pundit Charles Krauthammer of racism for suggesting that investigators seeking to find Islamic terrorists should concentrate on "young Muslim men of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian origin." King complains that "by eliminating Scandinavians from his list of obvious terror suspects, Krauthammer would have authorities give a pass to all white people." Krauthammer's proposal, charges King, is based on the belief that the "rights and freedoms enjoyed by all should be limited to a select group."
Colbert King's July 30 rant, "You Can't Fight Terrorism With Racism," exemplifies the opinion elite's hysteria and hypocrisy regarding anything that can be called "profiling." It is no more "racist" to focus on young Muslim males in an Islamic-terrorist investigation than it is to focus on whites in a Klan investigation. Yet it is doubtful that King would accuse the FBI of unfairly excluding blacks from scrutiny if the bureau didn't search black Baptist churches for white robes and gasoline after a Klan attack.
The outcry over "profiling" in the defense against Islamic terror is the culmination of a decades-long war against the police. The fundamental premise of that war is that racism lurks beneath most law-enforcement actions. Thus, any time the police try to categorize people to solve or prevent crime, they are doing so out of bigotry. But in order to maintain this position, anti-"profiling" crusaders such as Colbert King or the American Civil Liberties Union must embrace radical skepticism regarding the validity of any generalizations at all. Such skepticism would make not just national security, but reason itself, impossible.
The King-Krauthammer exchange was provoked by the New York Police Department's recent announcement that it would begin random bag searches on the New York subways. The NYPD started the bag checks after the failed July 21 bombing plot in London. The checks would be random to avoid any accusations of "profiling," announced Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Charles Krauthammer called the random checks "reflexive and idiotic" in a July 29 Washington Post column. They ignored the "simple statistical fact," he wrote, that the "overwhelming odds are that the guy bent on blowing up your train traces his origins to the Islamic belt stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia."
You Can't Fight Terrorism With Racism
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posted by Adam Lawson @ 2:58 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
"random bag searches"
Uhh, intelligent police work is seldom guided by, or characterized by, randomness.
Note also how no one gives a damn that men are relentlessly (and rightly) profiled for crime in general and violent crime in particular.
Apparently you can't fight crime with racism, but you can fight it with sexism.
This reminds me of a newspaper in Northern VA that used to print a "crime report" with the plea that anybody knowing anything about said crime or seeing anything suspicious that night please come forward with information etc.
Alas, the newspaper in a fit of political correctness would not list the race of the suspect when it was known. You were told about a mugging that occurred on X street in which a couple was robbed at gunpoint BUT no information as to the race of the criminal, which was clearly known since the couple had seen him. Obviously anything that was seen had to be taken in context. If a black man was seen running along the street near X but the robber was a light-skinned hispanic, the black man was probably a jogger? Kind of hard to be helpful, huh?
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