Profiling or Polarising

Interesting how despite everyone knowing who is being targeted by these new proposals, they will still try to remain pc and call it "passenger profiling". It's just so sneaky, so sly, so British.

The ex-commissioner of the police John Stevens, who now writes for the News of the World (a fall from grace if ever there was one), was more open about his racism and prejudices. He said Muslims were the problem and we shouldnt waste time searching other people.

So what does a Muslim look like Mr Stevens? Black? white? brown? orange? The fact is Muslims come in all shapes and sizes, all colours of the rainbow and all ethnicities from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Africans to the White Anglo-Saxon. Just who are you going to profile? And assume you do get mainly Muslims and just a few other ethnic minorities (who I am sure will be delighted to be thrown into the 'bad citizen' category), what makes you think that terrorists won't change their image to appear less 'Muslim'? Amazing how you didnt let your prejudices show during your time as police commissioner and insisted that terrorism laws were not being used to target the Muslim community.

You see profiling is unworkable - it was tried with the Irish Catholic community during the Troubles and with the black community over many years. It did not defeat terrorism and crime back then. The only thing it succeeded in doing was alienating communities even further and polarising society. The Americans tried it after Pearl Harbour interning all the Japanese-Americans they could find and almost 50 years later President Bush Snr issued an official apology to those thousands of Japanese-American citizens who were criminalised as an enemy within. Do we have to wait 50 years before a future British PM apologises to my grandchildren? How on earth can civilization make the same mistakes time after time after time?

Of course, Stevens main justification for adopting this policy is that the Israelis use it. The last time the MET police took advice from the Israelis on security, it resulted in the ruthless execution of an innocent Brazilian electrician on his way to work. Taking security tips from a country which routinely violates international humanitarian law and which practices apartheid is hardly the way forward in the war on terror.