A British MP has caused some con­tro­versy by pub­licly stating that pro­filing of Muslims is to be expected in the light of recent events:

He said: “I think most people would rather be pro­filed than blown up. It wouldn’t be vic­tim­i­sa­tion of an entire community.

What I like is that Muslim orga­ni­za­tions and Muslims with influ­ence are starting to finally speak up in main­stream society, bringing up impor­tant issues like the fact that many of the ter­rorist attacks hap­pening in the world today are being com­mitted by Muslims, and in the name of Islam.

What I don’t like is firstly that things have actu­ally come to this, and sec­ondly that pro­filing based on race or reli­gion could really back­fire. First of all, this opens a whole can of worms in terms of who is Muslim and who isn’t. Is it based on name? On one’s par­ents’ reli­gion? What’s next? Requiring people to put their reli­gion or reli­gious back­ground on their pass­ports? Like what was done to Jews in Soviet Russia? And how hard would it be for someone to bypass such a super­fi­cial system of checks: a change of name, a change of outfit?

I do think that people of cer­tain names, back­grounds, looks and ages will, and it could be easily argued, should, be scru­ti­nized more than the mostly super­fi­cial checks that air­line pas­sen­gers are sub­ject to. However, I think the issue needs to be approached intel­li­gently, to find effi­cient solu­tions (and there have to be many com­ple­men­tary solu­tions, there really is no one simple magic answer), that pre­cisely and suc­cess­fully help iden­tify and quar­an­tine those who intend to use public spaces as per­sonal, fatal soap boxes. We could start by hiring people of higher and more sophis­ti­cated edu­ca­tional back­grounds to screen pas­sen­gers, and we could invest in pro­viding training to air­port per­sonnel to better under­stand things like body sig­nals, psy­chology, etc.

All of which leads me to wonder if per­haps we’re headed for this.

Your thoughts?