It should be obvious at this point that Michelle Malkin doesn't believe that racism is wrong in principle; she believes it's wrong if it's applied to white people in general or applied to her in particular. Today, responding to the suspected terrorist plot the feds may have foiled last week, Malkin reiterates her support for denying people their constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure:
The bust reminded America that while the annual September 11 memorials are over, the jihadi threat looms. Yet, homeland security remains crippled by a 9/10 mentality.
Remember: The New York chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit against the New York Police Department a few years ago to try and stop random bag searches. The civil liberties absolutists are against random searches because they constitute “unreasonable” invasions of privacy. They're against targeted searches because they amount to racial, religious, or ethnic “profiling.” And they're against across-the-board searches because they lack “individualized suspicion.”
There are constitutional arguments against stopping people based on the fact that they "look Muslim," but there are also practical arguments--namely that terrorist organizations are quite aware of the lure of racial bias as policy for some Americans, and as far back as 2005 were "looking to create cells of so-called white al Qaeda, non-Arab members who can evade racial profiling used by police forces."
Now maybe it's just that I'm at a counterinsurgency symposium today, but I think COIN doctrine has a relevant point to offer here: it's impossible to get good human intelligence if people see you as the enemy. Were the government to adopt a policy of racial profiling as Malkin suggests, it would alienate the population we're depending on to feed us information about potential attacks. Also, if you're worrying about ethnicity rather than evidence, you're going to waste a lot of resources chasing innocent people.
So not only is racial profiling morally reprehensible, it's also just a bad policy. Unless of course, you see all Muslims as the enemy and you want to punish them for simply existing.
At any rate, what's with conservatives using potential terrorist attacks to argue for their own terrible policy ideas? There's something amusing going on here: since Obama is president, conservatives can't take credit for successful arrests, and the success itself makes it harder for them to argue that Obama's national security policies are putting Americans at risk.
-- A. Serwer
