Racial Profiling Could Ruin Your Life

That’s a play on the old joke, “A nuclear bomb could ruin your whole day.” Or, put differently, not only is Al Qaeda not made up of stupid people, but apparently they’re a lot smarter than our political class is:

Today, there’s some serious analysis of Islamic terrorism in the Washington Post. And with it comes a clear conclusion: racial profiling is a direct threat to our national security — it can get Americans killed in terror attacks. Let’s not be equivocal about it.

Here’s Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the U.S. Military Academy’s Combating Terrorism Center, writing about “al Qaeda’s new strategy“:

Al-Qaeda is covetously seeking recruits from non-Muslim countries who can be easily deployed for attacks in the West. The group’s leaders see people like these — especially converts to Islam whose appearances and names would not arouse the same scrutiny that persons from Islamic countries might — as the ultimate fifth column. Citizens of countries that participate in the U.S. visa-waiver program are especially prized because they can move freely between Western countries and blend easily into these societies.

Al-Qaeda has become increasingly adept at using the Internet to locate these would-be terrorists and to feed them propaganda. During the past 18 months, American and British intelligence officials have said, well over 100 individuals from such countries have graduated from terrorist training camps in Pakistan and have been sent West to undertake terrorist operations.