Muslim Profiling in a Nutshell

This ‘nutshell’ version of the problem of Muslim Profiling should be supplemented by my more thorough analysis in previous essays on this blog (links are provided below).

Today’s ‘nutshell’ is the result of my response to an article by Daniel Pipes in Front Page.com today, August 23, 2006. In that article, I found that two of his conclusions (which I have conflated into one quoted below) are flawed:

“First, because Islamist terrorists are all Muslims, there does need to be a focus on Muslims... intelligence must drive efforts to root out Muslims with an Islamist agenda.”

The problem with this is simple: we cannot know which of the hundreds of thousands of people who pass through our hundreds of airports throughout the West on a daily basis are Muslims, and which are non-Muslims, for the following reasons:

1) Such public spaces as airports have vast and chaotic movements of people in constant flux, and our profiling screeners will have limited resources;

and

2) any kind of universal system of identification that denotes who is Muslim will be resisted by the dominant PC Multiculturalism in the West, and will for anti-Western reasons be resisted by most of the Muslim countries whose cooperation we would need for such a system.

Even if the PC Multiculturalist and anti-Western gods who rule the world allowed us to set up a profiling filter that screens out Muslims, it would only net a certain amount of Muslims; untold numbers of Muslims would slip through. For one thing, Muslim terrorists will quickly figure out ways to try to pretend to be non-Muslims (forged passports, etc.). Furthermore, many Muslim non-terrorists will have incentive to lie, out of self-preservation or out of animus, or a mixture of both. Needless to say, we will not know that they are necessarily non-terrorists before they have been vetted. And they cannot be vetted unless they have first been detected, i.e. profiled. Therefore, such a filter would be far from adequate.

The only rational solution is to supplement such a profiling filter with a methodology that factors in racial data—for the obvious reason that most Muslims of the world are non-white, and most whites of the world are non-Muslim. Further racial nuances beyond the division of white/non-white could also be incorporated in a profiling methodology as ‘granularization’ processes, but they would have to be used with gingerly awareness of their increased imperfection and inefficiency.

Finally, it must be borne in mind that all profiling systems are imperfect and will have a certain amount of “collateral damage”.

For a more thorough analysis of this problem, see my 2-part essay on this blog:

Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam: Part One

Racial Profiling and the Problem of Islam: Part Two

Pipes is correct, however, that “the chances of Muslim-focused profiling being widely implemented remain negligible”—even one that does not factor in racial data*—because of the template of PC Multiculturalism which dominates Western society and politics.

* (In Part Two linked above, we have already noted that even a methodology that tries scrupulously to avoid any semblance of racial factors will still likely be branded by the PC Police as ‘racist’ for the simple reason that such a profiling methodology’s net will end up targeting mostly non-whites and/or non-Westerners—for the excruciatingly elemental reason that, as we have said more than once before, most Muslims of the world are non-white non-Westerners, and most white Westerners are non-Muslims.)