Profiling doesn’t work, except to alienate a significant segment of the population we should want on our side. If Americans start profiling people based on their appearance, then we will alienate that demographic profile, and that may lead to more fertile recruiting for terrorist organizations than would otherwise be possible.
- Profiling for young Islamic males is probably a bad idea, as this will alienate them and they are among the people we want on our side. If we alienate this population, the potential for one becoming a suicide bomber or terrorist increases dramatically.
- Many terrorists do not fit the Islamic fundamentalist profile. Richard Reid was British, Germaine Lindsay was Afro-Carribean, the Chechnyan terrorists who downed several Russian airplanes have been mostly women, Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, and the Unabomber are all white male Americans.
- Not all Arabs are Muslims. Not everyone who is Muslim looks Arabic. Most Arabs are not terrorists, or even terrorist sympathizers. Generalizing a profile of what a terrorist looks like will inevitably lead to a great number of false negatives as well as a great number of false positives.
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More on this later.