I have been thumbing Michelle Malkin’s new book on the subjects of the Japanese interment and racial profiling of terrorists. It’s an easy read, though not very well written, so I would suggest it to anyone interested in the subject.

But as this is a book on racism, the inevitable comment arises from a virulent anti-racist, such as this one on Amazon:

Okay, let’s just say for arguments sake that we follow mrs malkin’s advice and profile ONLY male middle-easterners. Terrorists arent stupid. They’ll quickly catch wind of this and start to change their attack strategy. What if they decide to start using females? If they havent already. Or more light-skinned people? Or maybe even children? Who knows what terrorists can be capable of.

Folks, terrorism is an idea not EXCLUSIVE to male muslims from the middle-east. Sure in the short term profiling male muslims might work, but what about LONG term? That is the key. We must defeat the idea of terrorism in general.

Now, the reader is correct in pointing out that Al Qaeda might recruit persons of other races or sexes, but in the long run I do not believe that Islamic terrorists will move out of the Middle Eastern male market much.

Terrorists are intensely concerned about security and secrecy, for obvious reasons, so much so that most terrorist’s family members or friends do not even know their son has joined. They are also groups which actively recruit and do not advertise much outside the Arab world. All this leads to that the existing terrorists get to decide who joins. In this situation the recruiter is going to go with whom he trusts and what he knows. And so he, being an Arab male, is most likely to trust other Arabs and men.

So at the end of the day, while we may see female terrorists or white terrorists, they are likely to be a minority among ME male terrorists.

Update

A friend who reads this blog e-mailed me saying “What you’re basically saying is that terrorists will remain ME males since ME males tend to be sexist and racist?”

Yup.

Godless comments:

I should also comment that nothing prevents us from switching our strategy once Al Qaeda’s ostensible B-team (the 70 year old blonde Kansas grandmothers who also happen to be suicidal jihadists) starts committing attacks. Profiling is one component of a Bayesian strategy, and of course it can evolve with time if significant numbers of non-Arabs (or non-Muslims) take up the Al-Qaeda banner. The smartest thing to do is to put it on a Bayesian foundation, with estimates for probability of terrorist given Muslim, probability of Muslim given terrorist, and so forth. I have a post coming up along these lines.

Posted by scottm at 08:27 AM