Racial Profiling is a Terrible Strategy

In a commendable act of patriotism, “Muslims, Arab-Americans and Nigerian-Americans stood together Friday outside the federal courthouse [in Detroit] to speak out against terrorism and Islamic extremists…. The rally was held during the U.S. District Court arraignment of terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who is accused of trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet bound for Detroit Metropolitan Airport on Christmas Day.”

If we are ever to completely eradicate the threat of Islamic terrorism in the U.S., the path of the protestors in Detroit has to become drastically more appealing to Muslims than the path of the Underpants Bomber. Racial profiling, which is not only unconstitutional and illegal (via the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment), would be extremely counterproductive to achieving this goal.

It’s important to understand that Al Qaeda exists in two forms: an organization and a movement. U.S. counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan serve to fight Al Qaeda in the first form. Fighting Al Qaeda the “movement” is a much more difficult battle. In his great overview of the structural problems with Al Qaeda, Thomas Rid describes the movement as:

… people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.

To fight this movement, we need to make it less attractive to Muslim individuals who “drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe”. Abroad, this can be achieved through nation building and foreign policy. Domestically, the best strategy is to make American Muslims feel like Americans, and not like foreigners in their own country. Racially profiling Arabs clearly would not serve this goal. Instead it would drive a few deranged American Muslims to sympathize with, and possibly mimic, the actions of the Underpants Bomber rather than those of the protestors in Detroit.