NY Assembly Member Thinks Racial Profiling is A-OK

It must really suck to be a terrorist; you can't even catch a break on Christmas. For those Scrooges at Al Qaeda, Christmas is "just another work day." Which means if you're Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, you have to pack up your things, stuff gunpowder down your jockeys, and hop a plane trying to blow it up. If you fail, you end up arrested and tried for 290 counts of attempted murder. If you succeed, you end up as charred mush smeared across the tarmac. Even Bob Cratchit never had such a lousy Christmas.

Luckily, none of that came to pass. All 290 passengers and crew escaped safely and Mutallab is in custody. Naturally, this brought the pols and pundits out of the woodwork, pointing fingers, lobbing accusations, and in general, making everybody's holiday season a little more political and a lot less cheery.

The worst of these was New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who on Tuesday, called for a bill allowing racial profiling for random police searches. Hikind has sung this song before, but in the wake of the Christmas bombing attempt, he believes he has a taller soapbox from which to shout. Oh, Dov, how misguided art thou? Let me count the ways.

1) He Has a Short Cultural Memory

For starters, let's go with the simplest one: Dov Hikind is a Jew. And not just any Jew, but an Orthodox Jew. He lives in and represents the Orthodox enclave of Borough Park, Brooklyn, supports Jewish causes, and takes nearly every one of his political positions based on his religion and ethnicity. This guy basically eats, sleeps, and breathes Judaism.

Now, I have nothing against the Hebrew people, or being extremely involved in Jewish culture; I'm ethnically part Jewish myself. But you would think that a guy who's that wrapped up in his Semitic roots might be a little more sympathetic to people being discriminated against based on their ethnicity! You remember that, Dov? You remember which people those were?

Oh, sure, Dov isn't asking for anyone to be rounded up and hauled off to slaughter, of course. And I don't mean to diminish the suffering of the Holocaust victims by equating him with Hitler. He's not there yet, and I hope, being an educated, erudite, scholarly gentleman, that he never will be. You see, Dov only wants a little discrimination. Not death camps, just, y'know, some automatic indicia of guilt. It doesn't even have to have any legal effect. You know, like this.

And yes, I know this entire section was a giant Godwin. But give me a break; if there was ever a justified Godwin, this is it.

2) His Attacks on Muslims are Unwarranted

Dov Hikind supports racial profiling based on the fact that "it would work far more effectively to combat terrorism than the current policy, instituted in 2004, which uses random bag searches." (Cite from Wikipedia) Well, maybe, except that we haven't had any terrorist bombings on US soil since Oklahoma City, which was committed by two white guys.

Oh, sure, we've had shootings, yes. There was the one in Binghamton, NY (committed by an Asian), Virginia Tech (another Asian), and Columbine, committed by two other white guys. Don't forget the Omaha, NE shooting at Westroads Mall, perpetrated by--are you ready?--yet another white guy!

Oh, wait, I know what you're thinking. The Watcher is conveniently ignoring the incident at Ft. Hood, right? That was a Muslim, wasn't it? Yeah, fine, you got one. Except he didn't need to be racially profiled, because he had a long history of psychotic behavior: calls and e-mails to Al-Qaeda and various terrorist operatives, verbal threats against the government, and internet postings signed with his real name, all of which the government was aware of and summarily ignored.

And then, the day after, there was another one committed by a Hispanic guy. Huh, I guess the only people we can let walk around without randomly profiling as terrorists are Black! Oh, no, wait.

3. Mutallab Wouldn't Have Been Profiled

Dov Hikind likes supports racially profiling terror suspects because, well, here are his own words:

"We can go after 80-year-old men and women getting on a plane. But the reality is that you look at the profile of what terrorists have looked like, where they come from and so on and it just makes sense to use that along with other things."

Yes, Dov, let's look at the profile, shall we? Here's one created by psychologist Dr. Mark Sageman. My comments, interspersed, come from this newspaper article and his wiki page.

90 per cent came from a relatively stable, secure background.

Mutallab had that, but he left and eventually stopped speaking to them.

Three quarters were from middle-class or upper-class families, two thirds went to college and two thirds were professionals or semi-professionals, often engineers, physicians, architects or scientists.

He did come from a wealthy family, and he did graduate from college. However, he dropped out of his MBA program and never worked as a professional anything. (For those of you keeping score, thus far, the profile of a terrorist could include me and possibly you!)

The average age for making an active commitment to violent jihad was 26.

D'oh! Our boy is 23. I know it's only a few years, but it's off. Also the "age for making an active commitment" is probably a few years before a guy would be sent on an actual attack, so it could be a little wider than 3.

[T]hree quarters of the terrorists were married, most of them with children.

Not at all. Mutallab had no interest in women. He never got married or had kids.

“Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They spoke three, four, five, six languages."

This part is more or less true, if broad. Mutallab probably spoke one or two Nigerian dialects, English, and Arabic that he learned when he spent time in Yemen and Dubai.

Unlike the lone serial killer, these men functioned well in groups. Indeed they depended, isolated as they were in a foreign country, on a close circle of friends who reinforced and legitimised their beliefs.

None of that fits our guy at all. Though he's not socially inept, he's mostly a loner who spent his free time praying and creeping out everyone around him. He couldn't find many people who shared his radical views.

“When you look at the global Salafi jihad, you have three waves. The first were the companions of bin Laden, the characters in Afghanistan in the 1980s,” [Dr. Mark Sageman] said. “The second, on whom my 2003 research was based, were the best and the brightest from the Middle East. Those are the guys who became radicalised in the West. Many of them are engineers and physicians."

“And the third are what people call the home-grown, these are the guys who are second or third generation in the West, and they are less well-educated. Their average age is about 19 or 20, and there are more criminal elements there.”

So, no mention of anyone from Nigeria, or Black Africans (which is what racial profiling would be based on!). Group 2 is transplants into Britain, which Mutallab is, but he was brought there by his parents, who had business interests. Dr. Sageman is talking about people who self-transplanted, and would be a lot older than the Mutallab.

Both groups, however, typically experience a sense of dislocation from the society in which they live and work. Clive Walker, a terrorism specialist and Professor of Criminal Justice at Leeds University, says that Mohammad Sidique Khan and his three companions shared a form of “social anomie.”

“It’s a kind of in-between state, a symptom of rejection in many ways. They feel rejected, but equally they reject the available cultures, both of their fathers and of the society they find themselves in,” he said.

I'll give that one half points. That describes Mutallab, but it's tough to tell if his father rejected him or if he was just crazy enough to reject his father.

You know, I might actually grant that some of this stuff be useful. If we could invent a device that scanned every passerby to see if they were an isolated, worldly, educated, hyper-religious kid from a rich, moderately religious family, maybe that might be worth something.

But pulling Arabs out line for special patdowns? Why? It clearly wouldn't have worked here. To make a race-based identification, you'd need a terrorist who's the right race, and we don't have one!

4. Mutallab Didn't Need to be Profiled

We caught him, didn't we?

Okay, that's weak, I know. It was partially due to his own bungling, and partially due to the Dutch guy next to him, who (and I'm speculating here) asked, "Excuse me sir, but do you know your crotch is on fire?"

But seriously, Umar Abdul Mutallab never should have gotten on the plane. We should have stopped him when somebody noticed he was on a no-fly list. Or when someone noticed he had no luggage. Or when his father called the American embassy in Nigeria and ratted him out!

Seriously. I usually defend the Obama administration, but they really dropped the ball here. We had about ten different stops along the way where Mutallab could have been stopped, but we didn't take advantage of any of them.

So my question is: why do we need racial profiling, when we have laws we're not following now? And somehow, we're still catching the bad guys?