Preventing Terrorism in the Long Term: The Disutility of Racial Profiling in Preventing Crime and the Counterproductive Nature of Ethnic and Religious Profiling in Counterterrorism Policing
Abstract : After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the desire of Americans to feel secure made ethnic and religious profiling a tempting security trade-off. Generalizations about Arabs and Muslims as terrorists seemed to lead to an increasing practice of singling out individuals who look Arab or appear to be Muslim in entry-exit systems and in counterterrorist investigations. Civil liberties and Muslim advocacy groups immediately cried foul as accusations of profiling began to surface in the media and various government reports. Today, the main emphasis of the debate continues to focus on civil liberties. The aim of this thesis is to take a fresh perspective on profiling in counterterrorist-operations and demonstrate that profiling is actually counterproductive to an effective long-term counterterrorism strategy. This thesis first highlights major findings on the usefulness of racial profiling in criminal policing. It then examines issues of ethnic identity and the grand strategy of Islamic terrorist organizations and illustrates the counterproductive nature of ethnic and religious profiling. It will also demonstrate that while complaints of ethnic profiling persist within the Muslim community, the technique does not appear to have played a role in the disruption of actual terrorist plots in the United States.
Europe's Angry Muslims
Fox NEWS and CNN'S Lou Dobbs worry about terrorists stealing across the United States' border with Mexico concealed among illegal immigrants. The Pentagon wages war in the Middle East to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. But the growing nightmare of officials at the Department of Homeland Security is passport-carrying, visa-exempt mujahideen coming from the United States' western European allies. Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmakerTheo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals-eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance
It was an emblematic crime: on a November day in Amsterdam, an angry young Muslim man shot and killed the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, iconic European provocateur, for making a movie with the anti-Islam politician Ayaan Hersi Ali. After shooting van Gogh, Mohammed Bouyeri calmly stood over the body and cut his throat with a curved machete. The murder horrified quiet, complacent Holland - a country that prides itself on being a bastion of tolerance - and sent shock waves around the world. In Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma describes what he found when he returned to his native country to try and make sense of van Gogh's death. The result is Buruma's masterpiece: a brave and rigorous study of conflict in our time, with the intimacy and control of a true-crime page-turner.