Monday, March 15, 2010

It's a Religious--Not a Racial--Thing

Might jihadis be recruiting blue-eyed blonde American chicks in order to torpedo "racial profiling?" That's the question that leaps to mind upon reading this, from the Guardian:

The use of racial profiling as a counterterrorism tool has been fatally undermined after a second white American woman was arrested over an alleged Islamist murder plot, critics of the policy said today.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, a nursing student from Colorado, was detained in Ireland in connection with an alleged conspiracy to kill a Swedish cartoonist. News of her arrest came days after Colleen LaRose, 46, of suburban Philadelphia, was named in a federal indictment for her alleged role in the plot against Lars Vilks, who had offended many Muslims with his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad as a dog.
Paulin-Ramirez, described by her mother as a lonely woman who had "got sucked in" to extremism, was released this weekend without charge. LaRose has been in custody in the US since October.
The two women join a young Nigerian, a fair-haired North Carolina man and his sons, a US army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, and others who have been accused in the past year of perpetrating or plotting Islamist violence.
And this year, American-born, non-Muslim anti-government protesters flew a plane into a government building in Texas, killing a worker, and shot at the Pentagon, wounding two police officers.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: "It shows that racial profiling is ineffective, as we've always said."...
Gotta agree with you there, Ibe. "Racial" profiling is ineffective, since the people who tend to want to blow up large airliners full of infidels don't belong to a specific race. They do, however, usually belong to a specific religion (the common denominator of "the young Nigerian, a fair-haired North Carolina man and his sons, a US army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, and others"; the guy in Texas is an anomaly) and that's what security workers should bear in mind as they go about their business. Which means that Jamie, who's a recent "revert," is exactly the type of person they should be honing in on for extra scrutiny.

Nice try, though.

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