Right Side of the Rainbow

Charles Krauthammer:

The American response to tightening up after London has been reflexive and idiotic: random bag checks in the New York subways. Random meaning that the people stopped are to be chosen numerically. One in every five or 10 or 20.

This is an obvious absurdity and everyone knows it. It recapitulates the appalling waste of effort and resources we see at airports every day when, for reasons of political correctness, 83-year-old grandmothers from Poughkeepsie are required to remove their shoes in the search for jihadists hungering for paradise.

He’s right, of course.

And please don’t tell me, as one reader did, that Timothy McVeigh wasn’t a young Muslim man, as if this makes the case against profiling. So what? How many young male terrorists of whatever derivaton have we caught by searching elderly black women? As Krauthammer notes, even if we don’t always know who we’re looking for, we know who we’re not looking for:

You object that either plan — giving special scrutiny to young Islamic men, or, more sensitively, just eliminating certain demographic categories from scrutiny — will simply encourage the jihadists to start recruiting elderly Norwegian women.

Okay. We can handle that. Let them try recruiting converts, women and non-usual suspects for suicide missions. That will require a huge new wasteful effort on their part. And, more important, by reducing the pool of possible terrorists from the hundreds of millions to, at most, the tens of thousands, we will have reduced the probability of an attack by a factor of 10,000. Those are far better odds at far less cost to us in money and effort. And infinitely less stupid.