Why we don’t copy Israel’s airport security practices

Two days ago, I pointed out that there is an obvious alternative to the insane naked-body-scan-and-genitalia-grope security regime that our government has imposed on us in the nation’s airports. The Israelis, who are the number one terrorism target in the world, carefully question each passenger, and if his answers raise any questions, they take him aside for closer scrutiny.

Why, then, does the U.S. not adopt a similar approach? Last January I suggested a possible reason:

How the Israelis protect civilian airliners

They do it, not through gnostic magical operations, as all other Western countries do, but through the rational use of human intelligence, which includes, inter alia, ethnic profiling. Daniel Pipes tells how Israeli security in 1986 as a result of intelligent questioning of a 32 year old Irish woman boarding an El Al flight at Heathrow became suspicious of her and discovered that she was carrying four pounds of plastic Semtex explosive in her carry on.

It occurs to me that the reason the U.S. would balk at the Israeli approach is not just that it involves some ethnic profiling of passengers, but that the people doing the screening of passengers must be highly intelligent. Since this would mean that virtually none of the screening personnel would be black or nonwhite Hispanic, Israeli-type screening is out of the question for America—or, rather, it will be out of the question for America until whites reassert their natural leadership position in this country and throw out the idea that all racial groups must be proportionally represented in every area of life. (See my article where I explain how America can undo the fatal mistakes that led to the system of nonwhite racial privileges under which we now live.)

In short, American racial diversity, combined with the American commitment to racial group equality of outcome in all professions, combined with the entrenched system of nonwhite minority privileges which is the actual and inevitable consequence of our commitment to racial group equality of outcome in all professions, requires the government to have low-IQ airport security agents, which precludes security measures which require intelligence, which in turn assures that the government, in order to protect us from our mass murdering Muslim enemies, must subject us to perverted and humiliating security measures.

Commentators such as the blogger “Allahpundit” support the naked body scan because, they say, there is no alternative to it. Indeed, it will be impossible to throw out the naked body scan unless there is a perceived, practicable alternative. But can you imagine today’s mainstream conservatives and tea partiers proposing the Israeli way, given the factors I’ve laid out above? Can you imagine conservatives pushing for a reformed, highly trained, high-IQ Transportation Security Administration in which virtually none of the airport agents will be black or Hispanic? I can’t.

But who knows? The naked-body-scan-and-grope regime is so outrageously offensive that it could just possibly turn out to be the Achilles heel of the liberal regime itself.

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LA writes:

.Libertarian Steve Chapman writes at Reason:

Though the harm to privacy is certain, the benefit to public safety is not. The federal Government Accountability Office has said it “remains unclear” if the scanners would have detected the explosives carried by the would-be Christmas Day bomber.

They would also be useless against a terrorist who inserts a bomb in his rectum—like the al-Qaida operative who blew himself up last year in an attempt to kill a Saudi prince. Full-body scanning will sorely chafe many innocent travelers, while creating only a minor inconvenience to bloodthirsty fanatics….

We will soon find out if there is a limit to the sacrifices of personal freedom that Americans will endure in the name of fighting terrorism. If we don’t say no when they want to inspect and handle our private parts, when will we?

FL writes:

I would guess that interrogating someone is a highly G-loaded task. You need to hold a lot of facts in your head at the same time; quickly put them together to look for possible inconsistencies; and formulate new questions to explore those inconsistencies. You need to do all of this while paying attention to the person who is being interrogated and you need to be able to think at least as fast as that person. [LA replies: You’re leaving out intuition and pattern recognition (that is, behavioral pattern recognition). Interrogation of airline passengers for suspicious qualities not just a logical process of processing information, but of comparing patterns of behavior. And that is more an intuitive than a logical function.]

At any rate, it seems to require thinking abilities which are well beyond the capabilities of most blacks and Hispanics. Actually, it’s probably part of the reason why black customer service representatives tend to be so rude and unhelpful. They don’t have the intelligence to question the caller; figure out if the caller has a legitimate problem; understand the problem; and match it up with a solution. So instead they just try to get rid of you.

David P. writes:

Just a reminder that you were the first in positing that the election of Obama would have the effect of giving rise to and invigorating a genuine conservative opposition to Obama. A similar thing may happen in this “private-parts-scan-and-grope” regime.

As the “anonymous” determined enemy will find ways to get around the scanner/security regime, the security regime will get increasingly draconian for everyone. With ever more intrusion into the private space of individuals, Muslims, particularly Muslim women, will vehemently demand that they be excluded from such treatment on religious grounds. It is then that questions need to be raised, not the ones on intrusion on privacy, but the real one—how high a price will we be made to pay to continue having Muslims within our societies? And are we willing to pay it?

LA replies:

But my question is, when will ANY mainstream conservatives begin to formulate the problem in those terms? So far, none of them even conceive of doing so; not even in their most private thoughts do they think in those terms. How do I know this? When people are thinking something that is forbidden, it tends to come out in some indirect form. I see no signs of such thoughts, even in indirect form, among conservatives.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 15, 2010 12:39 PM | Send