But I think we're going to have to get out of the mindset that discrimination is wrong when it comes to possible terrorists. There is no reason whatsoever that my parents (86 and 87) or my mother-in-law (80 - sorry to give your age away, Mum) should receive the same sort of attention at the airport that a young Arabic Muslim male with Pakistan stamps in his passport should get. No reason, that is, except to avoid screams of discrimination and racism from the Muslim community.
Yeah, I know. Someone might be offended at the extra scrutiny. It's not 'fair' that folks who are visibly NOT of Arabic descent, who are NOT young males should get a pass. And we're all about 'fair', aren't we?
Not that I think the current policies are all bad - not at all. Frankly, I think whenever most people fly they're so pissed off by the time they make it through security that they'd welcome the stress relief of pounding a hijacker into paste. But that's an unintended and inadvertent (possibly beneficial) side effect of the stupidity of the policy that requires elderly women in wheelchairs to be suspected as potential hijackers.
Fortunately, it looks like the UK is taking a more sensible approach. Maybe we can learn something from them. They've apparently decided that if someone comes into the country preaching hate, that they might actually MEAN what they say. And although this has been tolerated in the past (in the name of political correctness and tolerance) it looks like they've hit the limit, and the policy is going to change.
Charles Krauthammer: Improving our odds against terrorWhen the fecal material hits the air moving device you can either keep things the way they are, make some highly cosmetic and slightly fundamental changes or you can look at how you're doing things and scrap the things that don't make sense.Britain's problem, however, is not just an alienated minority but a suicidal civic openness that permits sheiks and imams to openly preach jihad against Britain. The United States, for all of its openness, does not tolerate this kind of treason. Just this month, an imam from Virginia was put away for life for the kind of incitement that makes Sheik Omar Bakri a sought-after media presence in Britain.
Britain is now desperately trying to correct its never-neverland hospitality to agitators and inciters. It is proud of its long history of harboring exiles, misfits and revolutionaries from just about everywhere. After all, Karl Marx lived, wrote and died in London. But 52 dead and the near-miss two weeks later are helping Britain place necessity above nostalgia.
After 9/11 the security inspections which were designed to keep handguns from going on planes went to ridiculous lengths. Meanwhile, the idea of actually targeting the sex/age/ethnic group which the hijackers came from for extra scrutiny was so roundly criticized that I had a hard time believing it.
So really, it's like this. We can keep pretending that the hijacker/terrorist threat can equally come from elderly folks and small children and families on vacation as well as men of a certain age, ethnicity and religion, and waste a lot of resources screening EVERYONE, so no one will feel offended.
Or, we can focus on the known characteristics of the terrorists.
We've been programmed that it's wrong to single anyone out because of age, sex, or religion - and that's usually a good idea. However, when such programming becomes contra-survival then survival must replace programming. If it doesn't, then long-term survival gets damn iffy.
J.