In the wake of the attempted bombing of a Delta flight from Amsterdam to Detroit more security measures will of course be introduced, in particular more screening and analysis of passengers’ information before they are allowed to board a plane for the US, the UK and other countries. As usual, civil liberties campaigners raise the spectre of “racial profiling”, the idea that such surveillance will concentrate on Arabs, Muslims, young Asian men etc.
Well, as a fairly frequent traveller whose wife and children currently happen to be in the US, having flown there on a Delta flight from Madrid, I sincerely hope that the security agencies do use racial profiling and will continue to do so as part of their effort to prevent terrorist attacks. Despite all the politically correct bullshit, the fact is that virtually all the terrorist attacks against Western targets in the past decade have been carried out by young men from Islamic countries. The latest example is fairly typical, a 23-year old Nigerian who got his “training” in Yemen.
Of course it does not mean that every young Muslim is a suspect. But yes, they will have to accept increased scrutiny, much of it happening without them even knowing it or being directly impacted by it, except perhaps through slightly longer visa application processing times, or slightly more thorough checks at the airport. If, in order to avoid hurting Muslim sensibilities, the security services spend as much time on Scottish grandmothers as they do on young Pakistani men, they would be denying reality and putting us all in danger. I hope and trust that they are smarter than that.