The Drew Carey Show begins with a song and dance called ‘Cleveland Rocks!’, the joke being, of course, that Cleveland is pretty far down on the list of best cities in which to party. It sounds like a slogan concocted by the Cleveland department of tourism on the theory that if you repeat it enough, someone’s going to fall for it.

Last week, a judge upheld the NYC subway’s questionably random bag searches, deferring in part to the judgment of former U.S. antiterrorism adviser Richard Clarke. It may be the first time that anyone in the government has taken Cassandra Clarke’s warnings seriously (if you ignore ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.,’ you’ll pretty much ignore anything).

It may also be the least effective. Look who’s one of the latest suicide bombers in Iraq:

Muriel Degauque,
suicide bomber

Muriel Degauque, believed to be the first European Muslim woman to stage a suicide attack, started out life as a good Roman Catholic girl in this coal mining corner of Belgium… Ms. Degauque, 38, detonated her explosive vest amid an American military patrol in the town of Baquba on Nov. 9, wounding one American soldier…

… European women who marry Muslim men are now the largest source of religious conversions in Europe… European terrorist networks were trying to recruit Caucasian women to handle terrorist logistics because they would be less likely to raise suspicion. [Link]
Add to that the list of American, European and Australian white men caught fighting for the Taliban. So let’s keep racking up police overtime searching those with brown skin instead of installing explosives scanners at subway entrances.
On 7/7, Al Qaeda switched from using Arabs to using Pakistanis and a Caribbean. Not two weeks later, they switched to using Africans… A race-based approach fails completely. It’s suicidal to rely on it. [Link]

Related posts: Banerjee wants bag search ban, A profile of cognitive dissonance, The profiling myth