Post-September 11, you'd think the political right would be able to make a pretty strong case for some form of racial profiling. After all, we were attacked by young, male Arabs, and we know there are more young, male Arabs among us plotting more such attacks. As Slate editor Michael Kinsley put it in a recent Washington Post column:
Today we're at war with a terror network that just killed 6,000 innocents and has anonymous agents in our country planning more slaughter. Are we really supposed to ignore the one identifiable fact we know about them? That may be asking too much.
Kinsley -- a liberal -- advances a sane, responsible, and qualified case for some form of racial profiling. That's precisely the same thing The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan attempts to do in a recent Opinion Journal commentary, titled "Profiles Encouraged" -- but she fails miserably. The reason? Because Noonan's column embodies the same sort of insensitivity to the Arab American ethnic group that has plagued the notion of racial profiling from the start.
In fairness to Noonan, her piece is in some ways an impressive piece of journalism. She exposes a highly suspicious pattern of incidents, across the country, in which pairs of Arab males have been seen videotaping various target-type buildings: St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York, a large office building in Chicago, a petrochemical plant. We American citizens, and our law enforcement agencies, simply have to be able to react when we observe bloodcurdling behavior such as this. Anything less could mean failing to save the lives of innocent Americans.
Yet the conclusions Noonan draws from her reporting are extremely simplistic. She writes:
The people who are trying to kill us with bombs and biological weapons are not from Canada, Chile, China, India, Ireland, Tanzania, Congo, New Zealand or the island of Jamaica.
They are from the Arab Mideast. They are not Israeli.
They are men, and not women.
They are young men. That is, they are not old men, and they are not children.
So: We know the profile of the bad guys.
The truth is that we know a whole helluva lot more about our enemies than this. Consider: According to the Washington, D.C.-based Arab American Institute, just 23 percent of the nation's roughly 3 million Arab Americans are Muslims. The vast majority of Arabs are Christians: 42 percent Catholic, 23 percent Orthodox, 12 percent Protestant.
This simple fact has enormous consequences for any notion of anti-terrorist profiling that depends, even partly, upon race. Osama bin Laden's calls for jihad against innocent U.S. citizens simply aren't going to register with Christian Arabs, any more than they would with Jews or atheists. So it makes little sense to subject these individuals, who comprise 77 percent of the Arab population in the U.S., to the same type of treatment that might be warranted when it comes to male, Muslim Arabs. Indeed, religion -- not even mentioned by Noonan -- may be a more significant factor in identifying terrorists than race. Who can doubt that Al Quaeda would have a far easier time recruiting hate-filled non-Arab Muslims from Indonesia than non-Muslim Arabs in the U.S.?
These facts complicate matters considerably for any racial profiling proposal. It appears that what's actually needed, both for fairness and for law enforcement efficiency, is some form of simultaneous racial and religious profiling: A search for ideas as well as ethnicity. But steady now. Once we go down this road, potential abuses and even persecution become all too easy to imagine. And no matter how cautiously we might act when singling out male Arab Muslims for increased scrutiny, we would still end up harassing a lot of innocents.
Nevertheless, you can bet that the bounty hunters currently trying to infiltrate terrorist groups in this country are focusing their energies on Arab American mosques. And given our current plight, it doesn't seem so outlandish to suggest that airports, which simply cannot scrutinize every passenger, would be well advised to find some way of distinguishing Arab Muslims from Arab Christians. The operative principle here should be recognition that at some point, identity-based harassment -- depending of course upon its degree -- becomes thoroughly justifiable if in fact it can be shown to help save lives.
Recently, I took a Northwest airlines flight from Minneapolis-St. Paul to San Jose that was delayed for half an hour due to an extra security check. When the security detail finally arrived at the gate, he ended up cheerfully frisking four "randomly chosen" passengers: Three white guys with ties and an Asian woman who couldn't have weighed more than 100 pounds. Post September 11, it's hard to dispute that this is a sheer waste of resources. The war on terrorism has made ignoring the race and religion of our attackers impossible. But the first step towards a just -- and justifiable -- profiling policy would have to involve carefully studying the groups in question, first to determine whether the approach would be effective; and if so, to learn how best to protect us efficiently while avoiding racist stereotyping and the undue harassment of innocents.
Tell that to Peggy Noonan.
