Profile in sanity

[fontman]

Profile in sanity
By Bill O'Reilly
Sunday, August 20, 2006

We are living in treacherous times, and terrorists well understand that even when one of their murderous plots is uncovered, the fallout from the aborted action is a big win for them. After British authorities prevented a couple of dozen Muslim fanatics from blowing up a number of American jetliners, the ensuing airport chaos caused pain and inconvenience for thousands of people. Unfortunately, that will continue for the foreseeable future.

Osama and his pals must take great joy at watching 80-year-old grandmothers being patted down and their creams confiscated by jumpy security people. This is the ultimate al Qaeda reality program: "Survivor: Airport."

Add to that the foolish political bickering over who is protecting Americans better and you have great joy in Mudhutville -- the hiding al Qaeda leadership wins again.

Of course, the sane way to protect Americans in the sky is to stop looking for nail files and begin profiling people who might actually cause terror damage. That is not "racial" profiling, that is "terror" profiling. Most of the recent terror activities have been perpetuated by young Muslim men. So it is these people who need greater scrutiny when they check in for a flight.

I know that's mean, but believe me when I tell you that if the Irish Republican Army were attempting to blow up American planes, I'd have no problem being patted down before I stepped on a plane. I would understand and appreciate the common sense behind the close look. I would not consider myself a victim but would be furious that my ethnic cousins were causing so much trouble.

I believe some Muslim Americans feel the way I do. They understand that some of their co-religionists are remorseless killers.

But not all Muslims think that way, and certainly the ACLU and other far left groups oppose profiling. They fight hard against most strategies designed to make terror attacks more difficult. Except, of course, when it involves them.

You may remember the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) sued when the NYPD instituted random bag searches on the subway. Yet a sign at the NYCLU building warned that the organization had the right to search the bags of all people entering there. Hypocritical? You make the call.

The biggest problem we have in America when it comes to defeating terrorism is that some of us live in the real world and some of us live in a theoretical zone where all problems could be solved if only we just talked things over with those who want to kill us. For those people, actions like profiling, unilateral military campaigns and tough interrogation methods are simply too drastic. These Americans believe aggressive terror countermeasures actually encourage violence against us and create more willing terror killers.

Looking back, the actions of Presidents Clinton and Bush in his first year pretty much ignored the growing terror threat from the Muslim world. Little aggressive action was taken against al Qaeda when it blew up our embassies in Africa and attacked our warship off the coast of Yemen.

There was no airline profiling going on when 19 Muslim killers boarded three airliners on 9/11, all with one-way tickets to hell. Had we been wiser then, 3,000 Americans might be alive today.

But we were not wise then, and we are not wise now, either. Call it what you will, but lay off Granny at the airport, and zero in on higher risk subjects.

[thedrifter]

Profiling and Fascism
By Jed Babbin
Published 8/21/2006 12:09:41 AM


It would be unkind to compare Sheik Saud Al-Shuraim to Mr. Yves Leterme, so let's begin. One is working hard to extinguish free speech on the subject most important to him by moving our Constitutional fences. The other is employing freedom of speech to overstimulate a political debate. One is the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the other premier of the Flemish region of Belgium.

Mr. Leterme, reflecting on his nation's division between the Dutch-speaking people of Flanders and the two million French-speaking Belgians, said that the Belgian nation was an "accident of history" with "no intrinsic value." According to the Saturday Daily Telegraph, Leterme added that the Belgian nation amounted to nothing more than the "king, the national football team and certain brands of beer." Not wanting to be misunderstood in his disregard for the French-speaking Belgians living in Flanders, Leterme said they were "lacking the mental capacity to learn Dutch."

Anyone familiar with the least important member of the Axis of Cheese will tell you that French is easier to learn than Dutch, and that the Belgians are -- in the words of a retired Air Force officer who shall remain nameless -- "French wannabes. Can you imagine such a low form of life?"

That aside, Mr. Leterme -- perhaps overstating the insignificance of his nation -- was engaged in things we still enjoy, at least so far: freedom of speech, and political debate. What brings us to the imam is his sermon delivered last Friday. According to the Saudi-government sponsored daily, Arab News, Sheik al-Shuraim

urged the Muslim faithful to protect their identity without being subservient to foreign forces....He said that as long as Muslims remain weak, their resistance to defend their occupied territories, braving destructive weapons, would be labeled as terrorism...

"The allegation that Muslims are terrorists is a big lie," he said, adding that the enemy wanted to cover its obnoxious crimes by pasting such labels.

And he was not alone. According to the same report, Sheik Hussein Al-Sheikh, imam of the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, "condemned the statements linking Islam with terrorism and fascism. He was referring to a recent statement made by US president George W. Bush who referred to Muslim extremists as 'Islamic fascists.'" That subject came up last Thursday in a debate I had with CAIR's Ibrahim Hooper on CNBC's Kudlow & Company. What's interesting is that Hooper -- like the imams -- is doing his level best to use the accusation of racism to preclude debate. (There's an excerpt from the transcript published in Larry Kudlow's blog.)

There were only two salient points in this debate. I said that the president's use of the term "Islamic fascists" was correct as history defines fascism. I also said that, given the facts of the terrorist attacks in this country and in the Middle East, and in the UK airline bomb plot the Brits broke up, it's not a violation of anyone's civil rights to include Muslim males between 17 and 45 years of age in a higher-risk group that would be screened more closely than others at airports. Hooper's only response was to call me a racist.

What's going on here is an open attempt to prevent free and open debate on an issue of national security. It is a concerted effort by CAIR and its ilk to prevent people such as we from discussing openly what even the terminally politically correct Brits are beginning to do and what the Israelis have been doing for decades: airline passenger profiling. The CAIRheads are throwing the charge of racism at people who are demonstrably not racist in order to intimidate them out of talking about profiling. Everyone who has an interest in the First Amendment should be outraged and responding by joining in this debate.

Islamic fascism is an entirely proper term to describe the Iranian regime, Syria's Assad, Hizballah, al Qaeda, and all the rest. Fascism, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is "a system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism." For all the talk about the peaceful Islamic "ummah," that definition fits, with precision, the terrorist nations and the terrorist organizations they fund, arm, and man. Those are facts, not racism. Racism is, as Churchill said, to be despised. He asked, "How can any man help how he is born?" Ah, though men cannot choose how they are born, they can choose how they behave toward others. And to say that it is a violation of civil rights to screen Muslim males more closely than others at airports is dead wrong, both logically and legally.

No one is ever going to mistake Hooper for Martin Luther King, Jr. or CAIR for the NAACP. And no one who knows a scintilla of Constitutional law will mistake increased screening of Muslim males at airports with racism. The case law -- for decades, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education -- prohibits "invidious" discrimination: it classifies people into different groups in which group members receive distinct and typically unequal treatments and rights without rational justification. It is not only rational but proven by more than a decade of terrorist attacks that increased screening of Muslim males at airports is necessary to the safety of other airline passengers. It has nothing to do with invidious discrimination and is not prohibited by our Constitution or the many Supreme Court cases that interpret it.

If Yves Leterme had said about Belgian Muslims what he said about the Francophones, his life would be in danger. To accuse those who advocate terrorist profiling of racism is an attempt to limit our freedoms of speech and the press. It is, in short, fascistic.

Ellie