Stupid Security

Do we really gain something by patting down a two-year-old? Are we somehow safer? Are we morally superior because we equally pat down the 25-year-old Muslim male and the 2-year-old girl? Is the goal security or is it to demonstrate that we are “fair to all”? I think that if we’re going to win the “war on terror” we have to define who the enemy is. Hint: it’s not my two-year-old daughter. Another hint: Almost all acts of terror in the last 3 decades have been perpetuated by Muslim men, aged 18-35. I believe that it is inconvenient for many innocent Muslims to face heightened security, but I don’t think it lessens their inconvenience to pat my two-year-old down. Muslim men may not like this “profiling,” but they should understand it. If not, they are stupid. As it is, we can claim that title.

Said more eloquently:
Wall Street Journal editorial (Aug 19):

A return to any kind of normalcy in travel is going to require that airport security do a better job of separating high-risk passengers from unlikely threats. However, the fact that we may have come within a whisker of losing 3,000 lives over the Atlantic still isn’t preventing political correctness from getting in the way of smarter security.

Daniel Pipes (Aug 22)

Noting the limited impact that losing 3,000 lives had in 2001 and building on my “education by murder” hypothesis — that people wake up to the problem of radical Islam only when blood is flowing in the streets — I predict that effective profiling will only come into effect when many more Western lives, say 100,000, have been lost.