In Response to "Racial Profiling" Editorial in ISU Daily January 25th, 2010

Trying to get published again, this time in response to a rather terrible editorial in the ISU Daily entitled "Racial Profiling" which attempts to justify racial profiling on a mathematic basis using flawed underlying assumptions.

What follows is my response:

by Ian J Barker
The greatest fault of the Age of Enlightenment that led to Democracy in the 18th century is that it demonstrated how knowledge could be applied to strip emotion and empathy from human action.  The calculated inhumanity that produced many atrocities over the past two centuries may have possessed mathematical reason, but it lacked the respect for our fellow man that cannot be sacrificed.  Racial profiling reasoned or not, possesses this grim characteristic. 

For this piece, I address the editorial “Profiling proof”, published on Monday January 25th.

To begin with, the assertion is made that terrorist organizations are created within the Muslim faith.  One can logically infer from this assertion that it is believed that Islam, by its teachings or practices, fosters terrorist organizations.  However, this could not be further from the truth.

While some terrorist organizations arise from corrupt interpretations of the Qur’an, the Muslim community at large does not promote terrorism.  On the contrary, the teachings of Islam confer a message of peace, compassion, and humility.  Of the five pillars of Islam (Shahadah, Ṣalāt, Zakāt, Siyam, and Hajj meaning accepting Muhammad as prophet, prayer, charitable giving, ritual fasting, and pilgrimage respectively) not one points to some kind of institutionalized radical or violent behavior.

The fact is that terrorism does not grow out of the Islamic faith, but instead out of extreme oppression, poverty, and suffering.  For example, one of the three perpetrators involved in the July 7th, 2005 London Underground bombings was of Jamaican descent; a country ravaged by economic and political monopolies and rife with poverty and inequality.  The leader of the 2002 bombing in Bali was an Indonesian who received training in Malaysia and Singapore after being exiled from his country for political dissent.

Furthermore, we cannot accept these attacks as a demonstration of Islam’s hatred for Christianity, an argument that may somehow attempt to bear out institutionalized aggression within Islam.  It is well documented that terrorist organizations feel animosity towards the United States and the United Kingdom because each represents capitalism’s success at the expense of smaller nations.

For the sake of argument, however, let us accept the first proposition as fact (which it is not). To then jump to the assertion that phenotypic profiling (profiling based on physical appearance) is an effective method of divining one’s religion is egregious.  This is not only because it is unethical, but also because it fails in practice. 

The assertion that most Muslims hail from the same region of the world and can therefore be identified due to possession of Middle Eastern physical characteristics is invalidated by fact: the largest concentrations of Muslims inhabit Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, encompassing a vast array of differing physical characteristics from skin tone to eye shape.  Indonesia alone possesses 15.6% of the world’s Muslim population.

All told, only 20% of the world’s population of Muslims inhabits the Middle East.  According to a Pew Research Center study in October 2009, there are more Muslims in Germany than Lebanon and more in China than in Syria, thoroughly dismantling the concept that phenotypic classification is a reliable indicator of religious background, even if we allow the first assertion to stand, which it cannot.

Finally, even if we allow the first two propositions to stand, there is the issue of recruitment.  It is proposed that terrorist groups utilize more cost effective means of recruitment that result in ethnically homogenous perpetrators.  I’ll begin with the second component.

The examples given for airline terrorist attacks themselves disprove the concept that terrorist groups recruit within their immediate proximity: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Christmas Day bomber was Nigerian, and Richard Colvin Reid, the shoe bomber, was an English born British citizen whose parents were English and Jamaican.

I do not suppose that Al Qaeda made special arrangements to recruit these two, though according to the theory presented in “Profiling proof”, they would not do so based on financial constraints.  This brings me to the first component of the argument.

Terrorist recruitment is not constrained to geographic proximity based on financial constraints due to the nature of terrorist causes and motives.  As mentioned earlier, terrorism has grown from the seeds of oppression and extreme poverty in countries all over the world.  Some of the most notable terrorists, including the 2002 Bali bombing ringleader, arose out of political exile and anger in countries far from Middle Eastern influence. 

The fact is: the passionate and romantic nature of the radical terrorist message resonates with any member of any country whose political system is in extreme upheaval or whose living conditions include mass poverty and hardship.  Terrorism does not require or utilize phone calls or television commercials to recruit new members, thus rendering a financial or economic argument unreasonable.

While it is simpler to argue that discrimination, targeted or organic, is wrong, morally and ethically, no matter what the circumstances, it is more revealing to undo the fundamental profiling present in constructing the policy to begin with.  Applying racism of any kind, whether backed by mathematics or not, is as inhumane as it is ignorant and doing so only oppresses those whose oppression may bring them to perform evil deeds in the first place.

Edit: added link to the original article.  Sorry folks!