Sam Harris: We Should Profile Muslims at the Airport

The 911 hijackers were clean shaved, with ordinary hair, no head gear, and wore very western clothes. Nothing about their appearance said “Yo! I’m a Muslim!” If I were planning to do a naughty thing, I would not dress and groom myself to look like some stereotype that people might suspect might do a naughty thing. I’d put a lot of effort into looking quite the opposite.

“When discussing this, keep this in mind: Harris isn’t a racist”

Sorry, you state this as fact; given Harris’ past record, I don’t think it has been sufficiently proven as a fact. Frankly I think the man is a negative to the atheist movement.

What on earth does “looking like a Muslim” even mean, unless one is an idiot? One of my Muslim friends looks Chinese. One looks Samoan. Does Harris think terrorist attackers wander into the airport with huge beards & niqabs looking like something from Central Casting?

P.

His post made me think rather uncomfortable thoughts.   I think (hope) he was going more for the approach of: Stop treating grannies, people with disabilities, and small children like they are definitely the ones hiding bombs. 

In the past week I read two stories via The Consumerist that were horrid.  One was about a young girl, elementary school aged, who had cerebral palsy.  The TSA agent flipped their shit after the father made some suggestions on how to approach his child knowing how skittish she is around strangers.

The other about a 4 year old girl who ran through security to hug her grandma being detained.  Because the grandma could have passed the 4 year old a gun and some dope.

*sigh*   It is a damn theater but what to do about it?!

Harris: But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.

This is nonsense.  No matter what security procedure is adopted, the people trying to beat security are obviously going to do everything they can to be the opposite of what the screeners are looking for.

Furthermore, contrary to Hemant’s objection, the fact that Harris said this is a pretty fundamental proof that he is a racist.  The idea that you can know things about people “at a glance” is the philosophical core of racism.

Wouldn’t we be giving young Muslims a reason to distrust (and despise) the American government?

Yes, but from a rational perspective they (and non-Muslims as well) ought to distrust and despise the United States government either way.

This would especially be the case if we took Harris’ advice and made this profiling an open policy.

Quite frankly I suspect that this sort of racial/religious profiling already goes on, if not in hidden policy at least in an unofficial, or unconscious level.

Anyone with a serious interest in the TSA etc should most definitely be reading the blog of Bruce Schneier http://www.schneier.com/ 

It’s a little wrongheaded to assume that the only people who could ever want to do something are jihadists, it’s a little wrongheaded to assume there’s much correlation between physical appearance and danger level, and I’m sick of hearing of my friend, who has a clearance and works in security and flies several times a month, being harassed because he wears a turban. 

It’s also extremely misguided to think that we are still in some sort of high danger of planes being hijacked by terrorists any time in the near future. It was like the Trojan Horse: it only worked because it was completely unexpected that they would literally crash the things, as almost all previous hijackings had ended with the plane safely landing with the travelers going home safe in the end. Now, everyone KNOWS to fight back, because we all know that suicide plane bombing is a real tactic.

A far more likely plan would be to just detonate inside the checkin queue where hundreds of people are crammed into one room, who haven’t yet been checked by security.

Not to frighten you or anything.

 On the question of whether someone is a racist, I found this video very helpful to keep arguments from taking the wrong turn:

http://youtu.be/b0Ti-gkJiXc

In a nutshell: Don’t speculate on whether someone is *generally* a racist or not, keep the discussion focused on their actions and remarks.
Following that, Harris’ remark is indeed racist for the reason that Miko and Melissa have pointed out: Racism is based on the assumption that you can draw conclusions from a person’s physical appearance to their inner qualities.

I wasn’t aware that TSA agents had mind reading abilities, that they could tell what people were thinking or planning just by looking at them.

Just about everything I have read in the past couple years suggests that our biggest current threat from terrorrism is domestic seperatist groups, which are mostly white, mostly christian extremists.  Placing priority focus on “muslim looking” (whatever that means, sheesh) passengers ignores the biggest threat and lets any and all non-brown potential terrorrists skate right on through.

This is two problems–Should we openly profile muslims?  And an entirely separate question: should we continue to bend over backwards to put on a big public show of impartiality, and depriving people of their time, their privacy, and their dignity by publicly groping the elderly, infants, and big fat white guys in trucker hats?

But they did have Muslim names. Also they came from countries that were predominantly Muslim. Would you prefer they search such people thoroughly or just search every 10th person or so –even if they are an old lady or little girl? I don’t mind the extra searching of me so long as they are doing a thorough search of those who appear to be in the same category of people who think there great rewards in dying for one’s faith– you know, young men named Mohummed, for example.

How about if a person’s passport is from Pakistan or the UAE– do you think they should be treated exactly the same as the group of teenage girls from Iowa going to cheerleader camp? What about those who only purchase one-way tickets? Shouldn’t we get maximum value for time wasted in airport lines? I think this is already going on to some extent under the radar. I hope it is anyhow.  Don’t you want the 30 year old guy named Mohummed with a Saudi Arabian passport to be searched as thoroughly or more thoroughly than you are? Or do you really want the searches to be completey random?

How is it that they decide who to search right now? Who wouldn’t prefer a more efficient system– faster and more likely to detect dangerous people? Are people who might be profiled willing to undergo more scrutiny knowing that it might catch more actual terrorists? Is there anyone satisfied with the system the way it is now?  I don’t even think most people who might be profiled would complain that much if they believed it was more likely to catch an actual terrorist on their plane.  How much extra time are you willing to spend in line so they can pat down Sam Harris if they miss they ignore the group of Muslim men who have one way tickets? Wouldn’t you be more willing to waste time for the reverse? I think most people would.

“Harris isn’t a racist. ”

Um, yeah, that’s racist. Like, really. “Let’s single someone out for terrible treatment based on the color of their skin.”

Sorry. You can claim NOT to be racist all you want, but his own words condemn him.

Well if we mandate that Muslims clearly self identify themselves as Muslims, may be with a crescent shaped badge, it will lot easier to profile them and avoid future terror attacks. Give Sam a couple of year he will be proposing such a solution.

“Don’t you want the 30 year old guy named Mohummed with a Saudi Arabian
passport to be searched as thoroughly or more thoroughly than you are?”

If I’m the 30 year-old guy named Mohammed from Saudi Arabia who just wants to visit Disney World with my family, or attend a conference, or go home for spring break…I’m guessing the answer would be no.

Why does a fat white guy have more of a right to his time than a brown person?

I have to agree with this. Since you can’t actually tell if someone’s a Muslim by looking at them, then what he’s saying is “let’s profile brown-skinned people.” How is this not racist? 

because Sam is way outside of his expertise here.

 That has never stopped Sam Harris before. It won’t in the future.

 Yeah, the lock on the door pretty much stops the 9/11 style attack nowadays.

Richard beat me to it. I would not be concerned about a fellow passenger with a beard and a turban. The 9/11 hijackers wore Western clothing and shaved immediately before boarding the planes.

 +100

Harris is letting his own private sense of panic get the better of his reasoning faculties.

On the surface, he’s attempting to be dispassionately logical.

But his logic is incredibly shallow here. The objections to his proposal already pointed out are sound.

Further, his reasoning demonstrates flaws due to extreme tunnel vision. His definition of potential trouble is “stuff Muslims do”. But today, political unrest and cultural upheaval, not to mention the global economy and the pressure it puts on ordinary people, is creating “extremists” from all cultures, countries, religions, races, and creeds. Those clean cut white kids who look like mormons? They could just as easily be neo-nazi  holocaust deniers who have become paranoid at the ‘disintegration’ of their racial purity and out to strike a blow for visibility of white solidarity.

Nevermind that it’s veeeery difficult not to just outright accuse Harris of demonstrating a debasing degree of privilege with remarks like “oh, I’m sure if you’re X being profiled is a bother, but it’s not so bad”.

Tell that to brown people who are naturally born American citizens, and not muslims, who have in the last couple of years gotten thrown in concrete cells at the airport, been held for ten hours without breaks or food, and rectally probed by large meat headed white rent-a-cops who audibly sneer about ‘rag heads’ from the other side of the door.

No bother, really!

This is not a rhetorical question: what would it take for Sam Harris to be considered a bigot by a large enough contingent of the atheist community?

Richard Wade is right on the money. Those who are actually planning on pulling some terrorist shit on an airplane are going to to make themselves appear the exact opposite of the expected image of a terrorist. So not only would the profiling be a waste of time and discriminatingly intrusive, but it would also make it easier for terrorists to bypass.

I don’t know, but this has definitely tipped the balance for me.

Um-DUH? he doesn’t. The point is, in the effort to make it look like they aren’t they are watching one particular group, the TSA goes out of their way to make everyone’s life hell. Including a certain big fat white guy in a trucker hat who was pulled out of line for a detailed search THIRTY-EIGHT TIMES in an eighteen month period between 2003 and 2005. (My husband, who was working field service and traveling constantly.)

I’ve always felt that there were four fairly simple reasons to oppose this sort of profiling:

1) I don’t think it’s possible to promote racial or religious profiling without promoting racial and religious discrimination, and not just because profiling *is* a form of discrimination. However much you say “don’t be racist”, promoting a policy like this is undermining cultural norms of fairness and encouraging security agents to always notice race. Whether Sam Harris is a racist or not impacts few people directly. Whether racism is encouraged in the TSA, even unintentionally, could affect many people.

2) Racial profiling de facto already happens. How much do we gain by officially sanctioning it?

3) It’s difficult to believe that introducing racial profiling is one of the most important ways we can improve security (or the costs thereof). It seems to me we should try to exhaust methods that *don’t* undermine norms of fairness and *don’t* burn through America’s remaining reputation and political capital amongst Muslims. Simply always being strong enough to defend ourselves against terrorism seems like a piss-poor, unsustainable strategy to ward off attack. We need at least a veneer of fairness to show good will (just as one of the best ways to establish peace after a conventional war is to decline to penalize the losing side as much as seems “fair” to the winners).

4) I think we overestimate the likelihood of another 9/11. It has been over a decade, and 9/11 is still the only incident remotely like it in our history. I highly doubt that hijacking planes is even a salient target to competent terrorists anymore. Those with the smarts and dedication to pull off a serious attack will look elsewhere to rack up a death toll (while we continue to handle cases like that of the underwear bomber, who had little chance of even bringing down the plane he was on). I think we have gone way past the point of diminishing returns on airport security.

Bonus concern #5: Our constant attempts to strengthen security in the U.S. are increasing budgets for things we don’t really need to be spending on, increasing authoritarian politics, and increasing possibilities for corruption and abuse of power. At what point does it stop being worth it to try to prevent another 9/11, if along the way we become kleptocratic and stagnant? Sam Harris is a utilitarian, more or less. How do we rate a 5% chance of saving thousands of lives against the economic and cultural capital of millions (capital that in the long run also saves lives)? What probabilities and magnitudes actually go into each side, and when does it stop being worth it to pump up security, even to stop another 9/11?

Suppose we asked Muslim Americans what would make them feel safest in regards to air travel? If they were more willing to be searched in order to feel more secure and protected from extremists, then it might be worthwhile to consider it.

I work with Muslims who seem to fear the more extremist members of Islam more than I do. 

I’m really shocked that Sam Harris would say something like this.  I have to say, I’m deeply disappointed…

while that comment might make people feel all smug, it’s absurd. everyone now gets a shake-down at the airport . if you have even casually followed the absurdity of the TSA, you would see how time is being wasted searching the elderly , the infirm, children etc. , all to make us feel like we’re not singling people out.

 “it’s a little wrongheaded to assume there’s much correlation between physical appearance and danger level”.
  a lone male loitering near  a women’s shelter is gonna send out a more of a vibe than a 17 year old girl, and it should.

I just keep thinking of more problems with this. Are we all aware that a huge percentage of the world’s Muslims are in Southeast Asia? That significant fraction in the United States are converts with little or no Arab ancestry?

No.. Your stupid if you think brown people deserve more scrutiny than me! But thank you for advocating for an easier time for my hijinks when I’m in public because I’m white. I hope you have to sit next to me on a plane when I get my booze and drugs and porno past security. Have a nice flight racist bitch. 

Also Important part:
“Clearly some people don’t mind being profiled and are eager to show they have nothing to hide” but not you huh?!

Here’s something you don’t seem to understand, I don’t know or trust you. I don’t trust you any more than I trust that muslim looking person you think I should be afraid of. Your race, or religion does not give you any special favor with me. And the more I think about it, the more I trust you even less, because your trying to get security to look at someone other than you. Same with that old person you also think is special, I don’t trust them either. For all I know their crazy kid shoved a bomb up their old senile ass. 

So search all of us, or none of us, because neither the old lady, the little kid, the white guy, or you are special, I trust none of ya.

You get the same thing in Bulgaria (minus the Muslim).  Nudged my brain because Tatarstan and Bulgaria were, legend says, founded by two brothers.

That many Muslims don’t understand security doesn’t change the equation.  This isn’t (just) about rights and dignity.  Racial profiling makes us less secure.  End of story.

“Harris isn’t a racist.”

No, he’s a fucking asshole for supporting the kind of profiling that gets Dick Cheney all hot and bothered.

Seriously, Hemant. This is bullshit. I get that Sam Harris a leading atheist voice, etc., etc., but justifying  Harris’s ignorant statements with a bulleted list is kind of pathetic.

I continue to hold the same semi-serious opinion as always:

Everyone going on an airplane should be given a powerful tranquilizer developed specifically for the purpose. They should be packed into tiny, bunk-bed-like spaces for the duration of the flight. At the end of the flight, they would receive an antidote. The passengers would be required to dress in a provided single-use sleeping suit for the duration of the flight, designed to allow medical access in the event of an emergency.

Anyone desiring to travel by air would have to go to a clinic and be tested for medical intolerance for the tranquilizers. The few with legitimate medical objections would be allowed to bring nothing but a single book and their clothing onto the flight (water and any medically-required foodstuff would be provided).

This would not only make terrorism much less likely but also allow the airlines to fit more people on a flight. And it would eliminate many of the unpleasant side effects of flying.

I call BS on your claims. Where did he say anything about targeting women with violence or saying that non-white countries are automatically barbaric. You won’t find that in his writings. While I agree with Hemant that there are problems with racial profiling, I also think that when you make assumptions about him based on his gender and race (and yes that is what you are doing. You have no proof to back up your claims besides his race and gender) then how are you any less sexist or racist than you accuse him of being?

But how many non-Muslim terrorists are attacking the US?

Isn’t this the exact opposite of what you were arguing above?

That sounds suspiciously like the guy blacksplaining to me that it’s just a fact that black people are statistically more likely to commit a crime, so it’s only natural that we should focus our limited resources where they’ll be the most effective.

Even within my family, we look different. (My brother has much lighter skin and hair.) Some people have been surprised to find out my brother and I are related.

I’ve met Muslims with really different appearances, who are from different countries. The families of a friend of mine and of a coworker are both from the same country (Egypt) but they’re members of different religions.

 Being Muslim, isn’t a race– it’s a religion.  Islam is a religion that teaches that killing infidels and dying for Allah is a way to earn a place in heaven for you and your family. It is the predominate religion of suicide terrorists and the single biggest predictor of who is likely to be a threat to be a threat to other passengers.  Granted, the risk is low and I’m not sure groping or these invasive x-ray machines actually make anyone more secure… but if they are going to happen, do you want it to be completely random, or would you prefer to have fewer grannies and families searched so that more time might be focused on people who seem to fit in with these folks:  http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IGimUcQFiX0/TmtcUuOZy1I/AAAAAAAAK4E/ZOUpqfeJSh8/s1600/hijackers.jpg

Insurance companies use actuary charts to assess risks and some think it might be smart to have airport security follow a similar procedure.

If you want to call Sam anti-theist– go ahead. But racist? What “race” are Muslims?

As an evidence based person, I have to look at security procedures across the world and gauge their results based upon their threats.  In that regard,  Israel seems to win top marks for greatest threat and largest mitigation.  Their policy is heavily based on profiling.

Profiling seems to work.  Of course, you might get the 85 year old Jew who wants to blow up Italian airliners, but the question here is a matter of averages, not absolutes.

What “race” are Muslims?

How does Sam propose we identify the Muslims?

We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim

(emphasis mine)Oh, ok, so we should just screen everyone.

He can choose not to wear the turban, though.

No, that doesn’t justify the increased scrutiny — especially if he HAS CLEARANCE — but it is a viable solution to the problem.

Blacksplaining? Don’t you mean whiteplaining? I dislike all of the -splaining words that people use because they use race/gender/sexual orientation words in a negative way, but you should at least be consistant in their meaning.

And we do often focus our limited resourses in poorer neighborhoods with the most crime which often happen to be black. That is simply because that is where the police are most needed.

It seems like Sam Harris is starting from the false premise of the TSA being an anti terrorism team. Airport security isn’t just looking for terrorists. What about drug smugglers, human traffickers, movers of stolen goods and cash… there are numerous situations that security deals with on a daily basis. It sucks to deal with it but it’s a system of being fair to everyone by being unfair to everyone. As bad as it is when going through, I wouldn’t fly if it were not in place. Security, at least, keeps the amateurs from even considering something nasty.

Another thing I’ll point out: I work at a popular airport in Canada (not for security). Our security team is made up almost entirely of the same peoples that Sam would have them profile.

 Thank you.  This is like when some MRA says “but I know women who LIKE being treated like sex dolls and servants, so therefore it’s a good thing!” or racists who say “I have black friends who don’t think there is any racism in the world, therefore racism doesn’t exist anymore!”  It’s an excuse and proves nothing.

“Well, maybe institutionalized racism isn’t a good idea and has been shown not to work, but if you can’t come up with something better then I win by default!”

Creationist argument techniques seem to be seeping into other debates.

BTW, people all over, as well as here, have made suggestions as to how else to do it.  You just don’t want to hear it and are pretending it never happened because you’re dedicated to your racist method.
 

I know lots of people who think that everyone should be searched on every streetcorner, be intimately searched and tested before being allowed to work any job, and would have no problem living in a veritable police state if that would make them “feel safer”.  That does not mean that it works, that it makes anyone safer, or that others should be subjected to a gloved finger in the ass just because you or anyone else find it a comforting security blanket.  Same goes for Muslims.  If I can find some Muslims who are willing to be subjected to racism to “make us safer”, why does their opinion count more than the Muslims who aren’t willing to trade their rights and equality away for an illusion of safety?  Why does the pro-gloved hand crowd get top priority and get to force that gloved hand up an unwilling ass?

Don’t you mean whiteplaining?

Yes, that occurred to me in the kitchen afterwards.  And that it was just a poor word choice in general.

What you have to be careful of when ‘targeting your resources’ is that you don’t end up less effective.  The reasons that can happen are different in these two examples.  With airport security, terrorism is a moving target.  They can adapt to what security measures we have in place.  After the shoe bomber, and the required removal of shoes, Bruce Schneier joked, “Next thing they’ll plant bombs in their underwear”.  Sure enough.

 In neighborhood crime, if police start looking for crime based on color rather than ‘real’ indicators like behavior, then they get lazy and substitute color for more effective indicators.  They start to focus on one color and ignore the others.  Aside from being ‘unfair’ to the target color, it also leads to less effective policing/security.

But it works, so we really shouldn’t knock it. In fact, we should maybe TRY IT.

Sounds not unlike my father’s family (though they hail from Mexico). Between all the cousins, we probably cover the 2/3 of the possible human skin tones (from “Chocolate” to “Almost Albino”). Of course the very geography of the Middle East means a lot of different populations meeting and mixing. It really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that not everyone from any given region is the same color, yet we still talk as if we had these neat, distinct groups…

And of course Islam has never been confined to (or the only religion in) “Islamic” countries. Of course theocrats have always wanted people to think that a country shares one unified set of beliefs (like when the religious right talks about the U.S. as a “Christian” nation), but that’s never the case. Even with overwhelming majorities, there are still differences within each religion…

“Since you can’t actually tell if someone’s a Muslim by looking at them,
then what he’s saying is “let’s profile brown-skinned people.””

So… you admit that can’t actually tell what a Muslim is by sight, so
your first assumption is that the obvious connection is ‘brown-skinned
people’?

Who’s being presumptuous here, Harris or the people calling him racist using racist preconceptions to do so?

Harris is making the point that some categories of people, like the
elderly and children may be exempt from searches, sort of like
‘anti-profiling’ techniques.  He’s admitting that the position he’s advocating would keep himself in the to-watch list, so claims of racism based on this don’t ring true.

I’m not sure i agree with you on EVERYTHING but i also understand why your saying it & don’t think it’s because your racist, unfortunately some peoples arguments boil down to, i don’t agree with you, you are racist, i can shout the loudest so i win. Not everyone here resorts to insults, so don’t be disheartened by one nasty person. Peace.

The American TSA was created as a result of the 9/11 attack. It was pretty much a “Anti-terrorism airport squad” from the beginning.

The issue here, that most people seemed to have forgotten, is that 911 was not about religion, it was about anti-American foreign policy. There are plenty of radicalized American citizens who despise our domestic policies. So everyone should be screened as thoroughly as anyone else.

You’re right, I grabbed the wrong number, 800 injured.  168 were killed.

Apart from the detrimental effect “Muslim screening” would have on fostering tolerance, understanding and approaching each other instead or isolating one’s group, one other thing Harris overlooks is that terrorists will adapt. Security starts scanning only people of Muslim faith with long beards and darker skin thoroughly, the terrorists will turn to fundamentalists with light skin willing to cut off their beards to fulfill their god’s wish. Only men are scanned more thoroughly, they look for more female suicide bombers …
Not to forget that all non-Muslim terrorists are encouraged by  “Muslim screening” since they now have a higher chance of success. 

Some degree of randomness in the scanning process is probably simply the best strategy.

 Is your turbaned friend named Singh?

Wow, lotta comments… anyway, this argument has been made before, and there is some validity to it, but it is often overstated.  And in any case, since our natural inclination is to profile people based on appearance, it’s somewhat dubious that we’re going to achieve the optimum by calling for more profiling.  More likely is that we should push for less profiling, and in doing so arrive at the optimum amount.

There is a kernel of truth in this, in that the TSA is not really prioritizing well.  The recent incident with the four-year-old hugging the grandma is a good example of their security theater gone badly awry.  Not to mention their approach of spending huge amounts of money and effort to close obscure barn doors after a single dubious cow nosed its way through…  

So in one sense, Harris is right that when the TSA makes grandpa take off his shoes or “profiles” people with poor eyesight for their dangerous contact lens solution, they are wasting resources that could be spent actually going after likely targets.  But frisking everybody in a head scarf is not the answer, and has distinctly racist consequences (regardless of the intentions).

In my opinion, everyone should be searched.
Should we give the ones who fall into the special categories (one-way tickets, Muslim, SA passport etc) more attention?  No.

I say this because whenever there is a loophole in anything in life – people will exploit it. if there is a gap in defences, people will exploit it.  It’s our nature to do so.
So making it known that certain facts about yourself will garner more attention than others and certain properties will actually mean you are never  or less likely to be searched, then the ones you need to worry about WILL exploit that fact.  So there is no point doing this as you will be less safe.

Just put up with it.  Life has changed for all of us since the 9/11 attacks.
Since these searches have been going on there have been several attempts that have failed or been stopped before they could be major news incidents.
We shouldn’t let complacency start now, remember hindsight is fucking useless

 O.K. It’s not about profiling Semitic looking men with arabic names (racial profiling).
It’s about profiling people based on their religion.
So, how do we determine a person’s religion at an airport?
Do we make your religious affiliation part of official government documents?
Do we make people wear a yellow star? red crescent? white cross? red atheist “A”?
 
This is a case of having a basic right under the Constitution, that you are free until the government has a “reasonable doubt” to suspect YOU, personally,  of violating a law. 
Everyone believes that until their fear and paranoia says its O.K. to yank this right from SOMEONE  ELSE.
Just as free speech is tested, not when we grant it to those we agree with, but to those we DISAGREE with, the freedom not to be treated like a suspect should not be based on the group you belong to, but YOUR actions as an individual.

I’m inclined to say just go ahead and put in those  machines that give a nude image.  They’re nasty, but my sense of violation is not equal to the outrage and delay of making Sikhs unwrap their turbans and checking the diapers of seniors.  The rest of the screening should be performed by sniffer dogs.

Just have everyone undergo a full body cavity search and x-ray all bags. Problem solved.

Makes one wonder why you make so many “gloved finger in the ass” references.

It works from my office, I’m at a University that pays for a Wiley subscription

 By that logic, everyone called Sean, Seamus or Patrick should be stripped searched, since the Irish have committed the vast majority of terrorist attacks in the UK in living memory. But of course you’re not advocating that, since Irish people are white.

 I read somewhere that the TSA recently  instituted a policy of special screenings for the elderly, disable & handicapped , in an attempt to resolve the problem. I have no details, however.

I’ve read a lot of the comments and wanted to clarify a few things:

1) Israel doesn’t profile on race or religion at all. In fact, there is a famous case where they caught a young woman (from Norway or Sweden – I forgot) with blonde hair who was carrying a bomb which her boyfriend gave her. If they had profiled on race or religion, she would never have been caught.

2) Israel has a tiny airport compared to American airports, this is true. And El Al doesn’t have a huge fleet – also true. However, this is besides the point. Israel doesn’t profile only people coming into Ben Gurion from Israel or the United States. Israel’s Ben Gurion airport is international and receives flights from all around the world, and every single one of those flights goes through airport security at the other end – whether or not they fly on El Al or not. If, say, you board a plane to Israel from South Africa, on a South African airline, you will still go through Israeli security at the South African side before you are allowed to board the plane. If you board a plane to Japan from Ben Gurion, and you are flying Japan Air Lines, you will still go through Israeli security. As long as your flight is to or from Israel, you will go through their security before boarding a plane. So, as Israel has hundreds of flights every day, and as a country with only around eight million or so people, they can obviously handle the security requirements for such a huge task. This means that we can do that as well. The whole “Israel has such a small airport and fleet” is a nonsensical argument as it has nothing to do with the amount of extraneous security worldwide which they conduct for any incoming or outgoing flights.

3) Sam Harris isn’t racist. He’s a realist. Islam is not a race, it’s a religion. And for all the people who decry the fact that Sam acts as if there are no moderate Muslims, I wonder how many of the same people act as if there are no moderate Christians? Sam is famous for saying that moderates give cover for extremists – in *any* religion. When he said *any* religion, he bloody well meant it. It’s only other people who start to quibble when it comes to Islam because, well, it’s not politically correct to lump Islam into the bogeyman that we’ve turned Christianity into – for reasons which I understand but find entirely stupid and misguided.

However, as much as I completely agree with Sam on the dangers and problems of Islam as a whole (as I do with many other religions, which I’ve written about before), I think that he’s misguided on this one. Again: Israel doesn’t profile based on religion, and you would think that they have good cause to do so. But they don’t, because it isn’t smart. However, their profiling works by various other means (Tells, dubious travel routes and history, etc….) This is the better way to profile. We *do* need to profile, but we have to do it the smart way.

I’d like to add one other thing: It’s really incredibly moronic and puerile to go screaming about how Muslims are being treated a certain way when we’re looking for…Islamic terrorists. After all, how many people here literally screamed and protested the way that Italian Americans were “treated” during the FBI mob wars in the 1970s-90s? Did anyone start screaming about how terrible it was that the FBI started investigating Irish bars for evidence of money laundering to the IRA? Was that something which we shouldn’t have done? I don’t remember reading about how the FBI shouldn’t have profiled the Irish or Italians when investigating their mobs and terrorists, and I don’t remember people being too upset when we set up an internal squad to investigate South Americans when trying to fight the drug cartels during the 90s either (although, I admit, I was a tad bit young then). Or how about when we profile Russian Americans when trying to fight the Russian mob? Does anyone scream and protest about that?

No, we don’t scream about it because it makes bloody sense. It makes sense because these are a subset group of people who belong to a main group, and *everyone* realizes that you’re only going to catch them by infiltrating the main group before accessing the subgroup. That’s just how it works. For some reason, we’re supposed to let all common sense drop in this area when it comes to Muslims. To get to Muslim terrorists, we’re apparently not allowed to infiltrate Muslim groups or Mosques because it would be “offensive”. How stupid. How incredibly dumb can you get? Believe me, when the FBI was investigating the Jewish mob (and there have been several instances), they don’t hang out in IKEA stores to try to apprehend them and learn their methods.

I sure wish people would get their collective heads out of their asses on this issue and start talking about it in a more serious manner, accepting the reality of the situation and trying to deal with it as best as possible. We need that conversation to be held by rational people. And the biggest danger of all isn’t that we’re not having it, but that the only people who are having it are the rabid loons from the far right who want to go well beyond the rational into the hateful. That should be the biggest reason we need to take this conversation back and guide it in a far better way than they ever will.

 articulett, I think you have hit on why Harris & Hitchens seem so bigoted.  They have an absolute hatred of the Muslim religion, believing it is different than many others in that it preaches  its right to convert by using war, terrorism and other acts of violence. They think too many liberals are blinded to this, that we bend over backwards not to be bigots we are deluding ourselves.Harris & Hitchens don’t want to target Arabs or Semites, per se, just the followers of Islam.
But they never really seem to be clear on how we can focus only on religious affiliation. And, in the case of Islam, religious affiliation has been closely aligned with racial affiliation.
For all practical purposes, it ends up being bigotry.

 oops, sorry. That’s what I get for reading one paragraph at a time between work tasks.

Well, according to the Department of Homeland Security, in 2010 there were 10 attempted terrorist attacks by Muslims as opposed to more than 20 by non-Muslims in the same period, so it appears there  are at least twice as many non-Muslim terrorists attacking the US.

http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/study-shows-more-non-muslim-terrorists-us

There’s also a link at: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=490127

Thanks for posting this: the first question that came to my mind was: does ethnic profiling work? If not, we can just end the discussion with “look, it’s invasive, it’s insulting, and it doesn’t even work”.
If it does work, then we can at least have a more informed discussion about “Yes, it’s intrusive, but the extra security is worth it” vs. “Yes, it works, but the amount of extra security isn’t worth the cost in intrusiveness.”

I’m also pretty sure that a lot of people on each side of the question don’t understand the probabilities involved. Specifically, the probability that a terrorist is a Muslim is not at all the same thing as the probability that a Muslim is a terrorist.
To illustrate: as far as I know, 99% of rapes are committed by men, and only 1% by women. At the same time, I think something in the ballpark of 25 men per 100,000 are rapists (and an even lower number for women, presumably). So the probability that a given rapist is a man (or p(male|rapist), as the statisticians say) is 99%. But the probability that a given man is a rapist (p(rapist|male)) is less than 1%.

Profiling doesn’t work because the details of “the profile” get out, and then the attackers can take pains to ensure they don’t fit the profile.

This represents the paradox of protecting the country while respecting individual rights. On the one hand, we want to treat everyone as individuals, guilty only of what they, personally, are guilty of, and making them guilty for the crimes of people who look like they do or have similar beliefs to them; on the other, we have certain statistical realities about what groups have members that are statistically more likely to commit certain crimes–in a situation where finite resources are devoted to a task, we want to commit those resources where they will do the most good.

As for me, I don’t think we should racially or religiously profile people, but it is hard to fault someone for taking the more pragmatic, utilitarian approach.

Demonhype,

while letting someone else pay the price for it 

This, exactly. People act like it’s okay if something unfair’s being done, so long as it’s being done to someone else and not them. In Harris’s article, one of the things that really bothered me was that he seems to think that the inconvenience of waiting in a long line is a legitimate concern and complaint — but that being discriminated against isn’t, even suggesting that Muslims (or people who “look Muslim”) should be okay with it.

I’d rather live in a free and open society than an Orwellian one blanked by fear and paranoia.  We cannot give up on the values and principles on which America was founded on. If we do, we’re one step closer to what those terrorists want. They want one united world ruled by captive and restrictive Islamic law.

articulett,

I’m afraid of extremist members of Islam, too, but I’m not going to volunteer to be discriminated against.

The thing is, you could make this argument about any religion. You might find Christians or former Christians who are concerned about the extremism in their group, and who might be okay with profiling or discriminating against Christians, but that doesn’t mean it would be okay.

Profiling’s just being suggested in this case, in my view, because we’re talking about a group (Muslims) that are in the minority here in the US, so it’s possible to convince a lot of people it’s okay, since it doesn’t affect them.

This is not only wrong, prejudiced, and misguided. It also makes it easy for terrorists to slip through with people who don’t get pre-judged. It also ignores the fact that most terrorists in America are white male Christians.

As someone pointed out in 2002, if we go from 10% random screening to ‘profiling’ 8% of travellers, randomly checking 2%, and giving the rest minimal screening, we’ve reduced a terrorist’s chance of being caught from 10% to 2%. Nice going.

 What are you talking about? No doubt if Irishmen were driving airplanes into buildings because they imagined their god wanted them to, we’d all want our airport security doing more extensive searches on such types– even other Irishmen… and Muslims! I think you are very confused and arguing a straw man. To undergo a search at the airport is not taking away anyone’s rights. It doesn’t harm anyone. We are all subject to such searches. We all have a vested interest in feeling safe when we fly– except those that are hoping to get to paradise via plane crashing! The question is how do you make security the most efficient– or do you forgo efficiency so that no single group of people is more subject to frisking and x-rays than any other? You have failed to provide an option– instead you seem determined to take offense. I take it that you are satisfied with the current system. You are fine being delayed so long as the old lady travelling with her grandkids is just as likely to be searched as the young Muslim travelling alone.  (By the way, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that Muslims come in a single color. Being a Muslim in a religion– it isn’t a race. In fact, there is no genetic basis for “race”– but that’s another story. The Muslims I know would probably be classified as “white” by you.)   

Do you think insurance companies are profiling when they charge people in higher risk groups more insurance? Who do you want examined more closely– a single man with unusual enthusiasm for hanging out with children or a single woman with the same enthusiasm? In general, which one do you feel safest leaving your child with? Do you think a nun is as likely to be a pedophile as a priest? Is it profiling to note that statistics show that most pedophiles are men? Is it profiling to note that “though most men are not violent, most violent people are men”? Can you tell the difference in that statement? Is it profiling to note that the hijackers that posed the greatest dangers to air travellers were Muslim men? Cock pit recordings show that these men were praising Allah as they drove into buildings– certain that they were on their way to paradise for their acts! Would you change your mind if Muslim men wanted Muslim men to be searched more thoroughly on their fight than Asian grandmas and Hispanic families even though it meant more thorough searching of themselves?

What if TSA agents were afraid of being accused of profiling so they bent over backwards to not search those who fit the hijackers demographic for fear of upsetting them or people like you? After all, what have they got to lose– they’re not the ones flying. And if their jobs depend upon them not giving the impression of profiling, then you can bet they will search and overlook as need be to keep their jobs– rather than to keep passengers safe.  What if TSA agents were trained by having unlikely suspects sneak in box cutters or more than 3 ounces of liquid or gun powder– old ladies and Chinese families and groups of gospel singers– in order to teach the TSA agents not to profile?  We can all pretend that these people are equally likely to kill themselves and other passengers due to their faith even though statistics do not bear this out. Would you feel safer? Do you really think it’s a good to spend just as much time and energy doing invasive searches on low risk passengers as it does on ones who fit higher risk demographics?

Sam Harris always seems so much smarter to me than his biggest critics. You seem to have heard what you wanted to hear and miss what people are actually saying.

It’s not nonsense. That six year old girl hugging her grandmother was, of course, not a Islamic terrorist.

So if I see someone in a bee suit (outward appearance) and assume they are a beekeeper, then that is racism. Great, I’ll have to remember that. NOT!

Before 9/11 there were plenty of hijacking and terrorist attacks by Muslims.

Prior to 9/11, American airport security was done by private contractors. After 9/11 the TSA was brought about so that the government could make sure the security standards were being performed uniformly across the board. The fact that this change came in response to terrorism does not make these security guards exclusively anti-terrorism focused. They still maintain all the duties that airport security had to perform prior to 9/11. They are the “Transportation Security Administration”, not the “Terrorist Stopping Agency”.

This is a pointless argument.  Screening should be scaled back to pre-9/11 levels and the enhanced intelligence be used to root out suspects (based on real evidence, not generalisations).

That would be the appropriate balance of risk and intrusion.  Even if it led to a 9/11 event every decade it would still be the correct decision.  c.f. There are tens of thousands of deaths on the roads each year, many of which could be avoided by reducing speed limits and introducing technological measures to cars (e.g. cut out switches for tired/drunk/inattentive drivers) but we don’t because it’s too intrusive.  However naked body scanners and enhanced pat-downs are fine?

Guess what, locks on the cockpit doors would stop people using planes as guided missiles and the only danger would then be people blowing them up (horrific, but much less costly in lives).  But no, the threat of another 9/11 makes people into terrified sheep and the authorities allow you under their maternal apron if you’ll just cede that little bit more liberty…  Land Of The Brave indeed!

http://reason.com/archives/2006/08/11/dont-be-terrorized

That was a very long winded way of saying “i’m not racist…but I think some people should be judged by their race so the people of other races can save some time.” 

Still  a racist position. 

Something else that keeps standing out to me in Harris’s comments, and here a lot… Why do people think old grandparents (or kids) can not be evil/crazy/anti-social? I’ve meet old people who would rather you all be dead than in line on front of them at the bank, so yea, search granny!

Ahh trust me, I use “bitch” as a gender neutral term. Although the internet likes to think otherwise my RL friends think I am probably one of the least “sexist” people around.

This. A thousand times, this.

It’s hardly worth engaging with Sam Harris on this issue, because he seems to be completely immune to facts on all matters relating to security and the reality of terrorist threats. How about we all just agree to ignore him and listen to experts instead?

 I live in the UK & have travelled to NI during the troubles & the security, at least on the Welsh side at the Hollyhead ferry was massive compared to say Dover, or even Harwich with it’s pretty much direct link to Amsterdam (Back in the day), so YES profiling did/does go on & you know what? It was pretty successful.

The change in execution, as well as the justification for and changes by the TSA in security procedures are all justified as anti-terrorism.

so everyone on here believes 9/11 went down the way the government says it did.  come on, there are sooooo many things that don’t line up.  Watch “Zeitgeist” or “In Plane Sight” or “Loose Change” – all movies that line up with each other and not the government.  I am not necessarily a conspiracy theorist, however when a tragedy like this happens in this country and they ship all evidence to china to be melted within two weeks of the event, that is just shady.  Not to mention there were IDs and passports in perfect condition located at all the sights “planes” hit that day, and everything else on sight was dust.  Not one bit of what was inside the towers was even a little bit in tact, but the “hijackers” passport was practically brand new looking.  And remember building 7?  Yeah, not many people do, it was the smaller building part of the trade center, and it went down the exact same way as the two towers – like a demolition.  The cause?  According to the government it was a couple of small fires that took the buildings down.  A fire in Madrid was burning for something like 12-17 hours and never collapsed like that, and it was more of a tower than a smaller building like building 7.  Also, a 747 could not have cleared the Pentagon since the roof of the building was still in tact.  The top of the plane would have taken the roof out, no doubt.  In PA, they never even found any evidence of a plane crash, just the ID of the “hijacker”. Did you also know that at the exact same day and time, there were military training exercises going on with simulated circumstances resembling the events of 9/11.  They were literally practicing protocol for an attack on the world trade center by hijacked planes.  It confused the military to the point that it took almost an hour for them to respond to the actual events taking place.  They weren’t sure what was real and what was part of the simulation.  The world trade center was built with steel/metal columns in the middle of the building, so if planes were to fly into the towers those columns or beams would have still been standing.  Watch closely at those planes flying into the buildings and notice that the windows explode floor by floor demolition style suggesting that this was an inside job.  It would have taken weeks to plant all the dynamite and explosives.  And no fire is going to take down a building demolition style, especially building 7 in which no plane flew into.  Oh, and did you also know that BBC reported building 7 collapsing before it even collapsed? 9/11 was a way to impose on ALL OF US, not just muslims.  It was also a way to start a war and gain oil.  Look at all the wars in the past….there was always a tragic event that took place in order to justify going to war.  Pearl Harbor is just one example.  What else did we get out of 9/11 – the Patriot Act.  That is a way to be invasive and intrude on ALL OF OUR rights and privacy.  So, I don’t believe Sam Harris is a racist, in fact, I’ve read some of his books including “End of Faith” which by my understanding is his way of pointing out that it is the people who fall in the middle that are the problem.  The non-extremists, the “spiritual” but not religious people, the agnostics, the moderates that are the problem because they are the ones who allow extremist, zealous religious people to continue to go on the way they do, because the former of the two groups are claiming to be open-minded and accepting of everyone no matter what their beliefs.  That is bullshit.  Anyone taking any religious literature verbatim and literal probably has been brainwashed to the point of lashing out on behalf of their beliefs and are also probably a bit mentally ill.  We have science now, people, we don’t need to ascribe everything to a God or Gods anymore.  That is for the ancients who believed in miracles because they truly could not explain a lot about nature.  There are no such thing as “miracles” – just things we can’t explain. YET.  Science is still a baby in comparison to how long humans have been around, so maybe instead of using religion as a way of explaining things, one should read a book, research, or investigate what one doesn’t understand.  It’s kind of lazy to just say it’s all in God’s plan…..but wait, we have free will…..oh the bible, so confusing and contradictory.

Lots to think about in this piece. 

I think one of the problems here in regards to Harris’s crying over the “racist” accusation is that there really isn’t a word (that I know of) in english that accurately describes what his position is  and for many people “racist” is the closest thing.  As you say Hemment he probably has no problem with people like you sitting next to him on a plane. Th problem for many is he wants people like you to go through more hurdles, more hassle ect. to get on that plane in the first place. As it’s been repeatedly pointed out, unless we all wear tags stating our religion, the only way TSA (or any security) is going to make a decision on your religion is by your race. So where he may not be saying that muslims and brown people have to sit on the back of the bus, he is saying that they should be treated differently getting on the bus in the first place. That’s not full blown racism, but it’s also not equality either. What the word to describe that? Whats’ the word for the position that everyone should have the same rights, but some people should have to go through more hurdles to practice them then others because of their race? Like I said, for many “racist” is the closets thing. 

As far as PZ, your right, he’s not responsible for the individual comments but he sets the tone. And that tone is one of a vile cult of personality. It’s a tone that encourages the figurative destruction of your opponent, and anyone who disagrees with PZ is an opponent. It’s a tone that is cliquey and petty.  It’s really as if individual thought outside of what PZ says is almost a “blasphemy” so no opinions that conflicts with his are really  respected by the hoard. Sounds familiar no? But PZ’s not a cult figure, no he never tells them that, but he doesn’t really discourage it though and acts all coy when called out about it. If you know that hundreds of people are going to harass someone on the internet when you make them a target don’t you have some responsibility to maybe set a tone that that is wrong? 

All in all though as two of my least favorite atheist I have to admite it’s fun to see them fight. 

Ha, I posted to the wrong thread in my browser!

If you make a racist argument then you are a racist.

Sam Harris does not just argue for profiling, he also makes arguments for torture, pre emptive nuclear war, and The Mecca Option.

Yep, he is a racist.