Panic Strikes - Lets Profile Muz-lums

Here we go again.  Another terrorist bombing and another call to profile Muslims, or shall I say Moz-lums.  Here is a great gem from NYC Councilmember Oddo:

It is important to acknowledge that nearly every Jihadist who has engaged in terrorist attacks has been a young man who called himself Muslim - the common denominator among the recent bombings in London and Madrid, the 9/11 attacks, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the would-be millennium bombers, the destroyer Cole, the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, Pan Am Flight 103, TWA Flight 847 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Errmmm...good luck.  Just how do we start to profile Moz-lums?  Race, Ethnicity, Colour, Mosque attendance, Gender?  I as a Muslim often do not know when I meet other Muslims that they are indeed Muslims.  Maybe my MuslimDar needs some new modules, but I have consistently made mistakes both false positive and false negative about the "Moz-lumness" of a person.  Its just a stupid way to identify people.

Andrew Bevridge, has done some thinking and writing on this.  He has actual data from NYC:

But even if the New York Police Department wanted to do so – and it has said clearly that it doesn’t -- profiling young Muslim males is virtually impossible. They are not as easy to spot as Oddo and Hikind seem to think.....Muslims will be much more difficult to pick out from a New York crowd.  They are not racially or physically distinct.

But even if one could pick out Muslims as they boarded the subways or airplanes, there is demographic evidence that it would be a wasted effort. When compared with other New Yorkers those whose heritage is a Muslim-majority country are richer, better educated and more likely to be married than other New Yorkers. Most are citizens.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Characteristics of Those With         Muslim Country Heritage
	Ancestry Muslim Country	All Others
Male	55.8%	45.6%
Black	9.2%	28.9%
White	56.8%	47.3%
Asian	35.6%	10.1%
Other	14.6%	17.3%
Four Years or More College	37.3%	27.3%
Married With Spouse	61.3%	44.3%
Non-Citizen	43.7%	19.9%
Working	58.5%	52.9%
Owned House	25.7%	30.4%
Median Household Income	$40,000	$37,000

This will be a fool's errand for Law Enforcement and we will surely have cases like that poor brazillian chap who was mistaken to be suicide bomber by the London Bobbies.  What we need is better integration of these immigrant communities in our societies and we need to help them defeat this stupid, fatalist, violent ideology.  Profiling me, my wife or my daughter is not going to help this one bit.

Comments

[Abu Sinan]

Profiling wont work. I am a white Males convert to Islam. I am blonad haired and blue eyed. I have tattoos. How do you profile that?

[elf]

I suspect that Oddo is simply being dishonest. He thinks that when he says "Muslim" people will hear "Arab," even though he clearly knows that many jihadists are not Arab. A tactic for securing the racist vote?