When Are We Going To Get Serious? (July 30, 2005)

To profile or not – absurdities abound

The Israelis have refined profiling to such an extent as to successfully foil 95% of attempted suicide bombings. When the Germans or the Egyptians search passengers I assure you that Middle Eastern males get prime billing. It has not gone unnoticed by both Arabs and Europeans alike, that modern day suicide bombings and terrorism is the almost exclusive preserve of male Muslims of Middle Eastern extraction. This reality is not our wish or desire but a sad fact of our increasingly tenuous global world.

Yet in America, the Land of the Free, the Brave and the ACLU, we have recreated our own Alice in Wonderland smoke & mirrors. We would rather search, at our airports and trains, 10 children, old women and 6.5 foot blue-eyed Swedes to every 1 Middle Easterner. Yet the Russians and the Saudis, the Turks and the Lebanese, no strangers to terrorism, would do the reverse.

Why do we allow the ACLU to define our arithmetic? For what suicidal absurdity do we allow political correctness to prevail over practical necessity? What is the fantasy that addles our brain so much so that we imagine we can regain total security in the face of this implacable onslaught with no loss of freedom and no inconvenience? How come the delicate sensibilities of those who would be profiled (rationally, understandably) outweigh our desire for survival and the longevity of our freedoms?

I now note at our New York subways, selective searches can be refused, allowing would-be bombers to vacate those premises with sensitivities intact, only to try another station or location until luck or chance allows their entry. Are we merely play acting? Don’t we realize that it is only a matter of time until the first radioactive “dirty bomb” or other WMD is tested on the naïve majority?

The ACLU confuses itself with Abraham, imagining that by offering ourselves as a sacrificial lamb we could appease those believers and their God in their crusade against us, the infidels, the unbelievers. But they are not Abraham, but Chamberlain.

Ultimately, we will have to choose between the ACLU and their acolytes and our very survival, between our perceived freedom for the next ten minutes and our freedom for our children and our children’s children.

The choice is ours, not theirs.