At First Glance - Racial profiling, burning hotter - World Trade Center and Pentagon Attacks, 2001

National Review, Oct 15, 2001 by John Derbyshire

Whether you think the present emergency rises to the level of a war or not, one thing that is fast becoming clear is that Americans at large are much more tolerant of racial profiling than they were before the terrorists struck. This fact was illustrated on September 20, when four men "of Middle Eastern appearance" were removed from a Northwest Airlines flight because other passengers refused to fly with them. A Northwest spokesman explained that under FAA rules, "the airline has no choice but to re-accommodate a passenger or passengers if their actions or presence make a majority of passengers uncomfortable and threaten to disrupt normal operations of flight."

Compare this incident with the experience of movie actor James Woods. Woods took a flight from Boston to Los Angeles one week before the World Trade Center attacks. The only other people in first class with him were four men "of Middle Eastern appearance" who acted very strangely. During the entire cross-country flight none of them had anything to eat or drink, nor did they read or sleep. They only sat upright in their seats, occasionally conversing with each other in low tones. Woods mentioned what he had noticed to a flight attendant, "who shrugged it off." Arriving in Los Angeles, Woods told airport authorities, but they "seemed unwilling to become involved."

You can see the great change in our attitudes by imagining the consequences if the first incident had happened two weeks earlier, or the second two weeks later. The first would then have generated a nationwide storm of indignation about racial profiling, and stupendous lawsuits; the second, a huge police manhunt for the four men concerned. It seems very likely that Woods witnessed a dry run for the attack on the World Trade Center. One of the planes used in that attack was flying the same Boston-Los Angeles route that Woods flew. If the authorities had acted on his report-if, that is to say, they had been willing to entertain a little straightforward racial profiling-6,000 lives might have been saved.

Civil libertarians are now warning us that in the current climate of crisis and national peril, our ancient liberties might be sacrificed to the general desire for greater security. They have a point. If truth is the first casualty in war, liberty is often the second. The reason that practically nobody can afford to live in Manhattan who isn't already living there is rent control, a WW II measure, never repealed, that removed a landlord's freedom to let his property at whatever rent the market would bear. But the moral to be drawn from that instance is only that, as legal scholar Bruce Ackerman has recently argued, emergency legislation must never be enacted without a clear "sunset provision": After some fixed period-Ackerman suggests two years-the law must lapse. The civil-liberties crowd does not, in any case, have a dazzling record on the liberties involved in private commercial transactions. What happened to a cabdriver's liberty to use his own judgment about which passengers to pick up? Gone, swept away in the racial-profiling panic of the 1990s, along with the lives of several cabbies.

It is in the matter of proactive law enforcement-the kinds of things that police agencies do to prevent crime or terrorism-that our liberties are most at risk in tense times. Whom should you wiretap? Whom should airport security take in for questioning? This is where racial profiling kicks in, with all its ambiguities. Just take a careful look, for example, at that phrase "of Middle Eastern appearance," which I imagine security agencies are already abbreviating OMEA. The last time I wrote about this subject ("The Case for Racial Profiling," February 19), I concentrated on the topics that were in the air at that time: the disproportionate attention police officers give to black and Hispanic persons as crime suspects, and the targeting of Wen Ho Lee in the nuclear-espionage case. I had nothing to say about terrorists from the Middle East, or people who might be thought to look like them. OMEA was not, at that point, an issue.

Now it is, and the problem is that OMEA is perhaps a more dubious description even than "black" or "Hispanic." You can see the difficulties by scanning the photographs of the September 11 hijackers published in our newspapers. A few are unmistakably OMEA. My reaction on seeing the photograph of the first to be identified, Mohamed Atta, was that he looked exactly like my own mental conception of an Arab terrorist. On the other hand, one of his companions on AA Flight 11, Wail al-Shehri, is the spitting image of a boy I went to school with-a boy of entirely English origins, whose name was Hobson. Ahmed al-Nami (UA Flight 93) looks like a Welsh punk rocker. And so on.

Other visual markers offer similar opportunities for confusion. This fellow with a beard and a turban, coming down the road-he must surely be an Arab, or at least a Muslim? Well, maybe, but he is much more likely to be a Sikh-belonging, that is, to a religion that owes more to Hinduism than to Islam, practiced by non-Arab peoples who speak Indo- European languages, and with scriptures written with a Hindi-style script, not an Arabic one. Sikhism requires male adherents to keep an untrimmed beard and wear a turban; Islam does not.