1)search ALL the Muslims and all the Muslim look-alikes!

2) Search a few outtatown grannies when there are no Muslims around to search. Granny’ll be thrilled and have a story to tell back in Peoria at the senior’s club.

3) Search all the ghetto types too, you know, the ones with XXXL pants on a 28″ waist and a sideways baseball cap on . Das rite MFer, yo, you too Eminem!!! These guys should be searched anyway, 9/11 or no 9/11!

4) Check out an occasional NYU dorky math major, some Catholic School girls (hint: plaid uniforms) and, once a day, a 90 yr old overcoated Hasidic Rabbi.

Voila!!! Random searching!

To all: Please don’t use derogatory spellings for names of religious groups. This post was edited to change three such instances as it related to Muslims. I’d like to keep discussions here a bit more above board than that. Comments section on this is now closed. Any questions on this, please email me. Thanks. –ST

Hank: I don’t think I’ve suggested ignoring other ‘targets’ – but when the majority of terrorist attacks that have occured throughout the world in the last 20 years have been carried out Muslim extremists, you’re defintely going to watch Muslims more closely – and you should.

However, whenever you harden one target, they’re going to go after the one you ignore. Also, there have been only two Islamic terror attacks in the Homeland of the United States…EVER. Why do we think that all of a sudden hordes of scimitar waving Islamists are going to be blowing up bombs on our subway trains every day. How is an obvious police search going to stop a Bosnian-born Muslim dressed in regular U.S. clothing with an inconspicuous backpack. Goodness sakes, all we are doing is make people feel alienated, diverting law enforcement resources that could be gathering intelligence and making arrests and getting people hysterical about something that is far less common then getting electrocuted by a household appliance. Goodness sakes!

Oh, and I smell a troll.

How am I mischaracterizing?

ST: If you find other people suggesting ways to keep others safe annoying, then I’m not quite sure why you even bother posting *ANYWHERE.* No doubt you’ve done similar here, and elsewhere in the blogosphere. Don’t get your boxers in a twist simply because people argue in favor of profiling in NY. There’s a larger issue at stake here, of course, that you’re deliberately ignoring and that is that the issue of profiling isn’t just limited to NYC but elsewhere as well so it’s obviously a subject worthy of debate. You’re not in favor of it, but no doubt it’s being done in places outside of NYC as well under the radar. I’m sure you would and have vocally disagreed with it. So it’s a bit hypocritical for you to act like people in other cities/states can’t comment on what goes on in NYC. I have friends in NYC and some of them don’t agree with my suggestions but they don’t have a problem with me HAVING AN OPINION about it. So come off the “don’t tell my city how to run itself” high horse. This is not just about NYC, but the American approach in general to profiling.

As to the rest of your comments, to quote Reagan, there you go again. You’re not only mischaracterizing my argument but being intentionally naive over what the argument really is about. I won’t continue to repeat myself to you. I don’t really have time to play this game with you today – or any day, in fact. If someone else who visits the blog and has oodles of patience wants to explain the argument to where you’ll understand it (and hopefully stop mischaracterizing it) they can be my guest.

You also seem to have this thing about getting the last word, so I’ll leave the last word to you as far as mine and your convo on this blog entry is concerned.

I’ve been searched at the airport many times and have no problem with it. I’m a white male and if the majority of worldwide terrorism was being carried out by people of that description, I would be glad to be profiled and searched — daily or even more, if necessary. It’s not that I have thick skin or infinite patience, I just want everything possible done to avoid more people being BLOWN UP.

Thanks for the redaction! I guess it is annoying to have others tell you how things should go about in your hometown.

“I specifically mentioned that they very well could and should do it if our intelligence community has conducted surveillance and determined that a certain type of person(s) may be poised to strike.”

Uh, the NYC subway searches should be informed by intelligence and surveillance? How? We just have a cop watching people go in. But I am happy you recognize that the idiot who just wants to search Arabs gets it wrong.

I say he can look for suspicious behavior. But “type”? What does that mean? Brown people can get by if dressed like a sikh, but with a smaller, islamic turban?

Actus this is a warning – don’t come to my blog and tell me what I should and should not write and what I should or should not be concerned about. –ST

“The simple fact of the matter is that a majority of terrorist attacks in the world right now are carried out by radical Muslims.”

I was talking about the guy that mentioned Arabs. Not muslims. Arabs. And in the context of protecting from attacks that did not come from Arabs, but came from africans, asians and a jamaican.

Now, apparently, you have some way of picking out the muslim (arab, asian, african or even white) from looks, which you expect the cops to do.

Damn right I’m “fine” with it – what happens in NYC as it relates to fighting terrorism affects me too. Unless you think I should have been unaffected by 9-11 just because it happened in NYC (and DC, PA).

“What about what I pointed out? Doesn’t it make you question the pro-profiling types when they get it wrong?”

Nobody’s gotten anything wrong here. The simple fact of the matter is that a majority of terrorist attacks in the world right now are carried out by radical Muslims. There is no denying that, unless you want to continue to bury your head in the sand. If our intelligence agencies who I’ve no doubt are keeping an eye on mosques (for example) alert law enforcement to be on the lookout for a certain type of person (be they Asian, Jamaican, otherwise) then that’s exactly what they should do. Maybe one day you may thank them for it rather than rattling on about some Constitutional right you think is being violated.

And it doesn’t surprise me that tons of rural red staters are fine with telling NY how to go about protecting itself. The village voice recently had a rash of something similar:

http://villagevoice.com/specials/0531,letters,66491,7.html

What about what I pointed out? Doesn’t it make you question the pro-profiling types when they get it wrong?

Eric: Absolutely.

With ‘friends’ like these were bound to experience another atrocity. Then, of course, the NYCLU will doubtless blame the police for ‘not being diligent enough’….

Morons. Why don’t they go out and do something useful with their existences?