By focusing on race and ethnicity, airport security screeners may be distracted from identifying odd or suspicious behavior, which may be a better determinant in identifying those with ill-intentions of committing such acts of terror. Behavior may be a better determinant, since terrorists may be able to identify the profile that security screeners are targeting and may do other things to obviate it. Race and ethnicity is literally skin deep, there may be other al-Qaeda sympathizers that don?t fit the profile who may have intentions of committing these types of acts against the US. Airport security screeners may not pay as much attention to these individuals because their job is to profile individuals based on their outside appearance, which causes them to pay less attention to an individuals? behavior.

If airport security were to use racial and ethnic profiling techniques to screen airline passenger, it sends a message to the general public that all terrorists come from a particular race or ethnic background. Although it appears that every one of the terrorists involved with the attacks of September 11 were of Arab ancestry, doesn?t mean that other possible terrorists will only be of Arab ancestry. Al-Qaeda, which is the group responsible for the attacks on the US, operates in 40 different countries, from Malaysia to the Philippines to Latin America (Online). By targeting only Arab looking people, we will not be assured that other future attacks against the US will not occur.

Profiling passengers based on race and ethnicity will only increase the suffering caused by discrimination against the Arab and Muslim community. It will only make it more difficult to form good relations within these groups to gain access to information about any Al-Qaeda sympathizers within the Arab and Muslim community (Satchell). However, it is obvious that we must fight back against those who have committed such vicious attacks on the US, but when we

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