Party of 1

Wednesday’s Washington Post brings news of a new assessment of the threat posed by the Al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen. The report carries implications for the ongoing debate over profiling of airline passengers.

At the grassroots, where it looks like “send ‘em all back” sentiment is to be found wherever you turn over a rock, there is a demand to profile anyone who looks “dark and swarthy.” That is understandable, but I am afraid that it will accomplish little, other than to hurt and antagonize a good many innocent people. There are one and one-half billion Muslims in the world. Of those, maybe a couple hundred million are receptive to radical “Islamist” teachings. But, no more than a few hundred, or maybe a couple of thousand, can ever actually have committed terrorist acts. To ferret out potential terrorists is like looking for a needle in haystack. That’s why the appropriate lesson to draw from the recent Christmas Day “underwear bombing” attempt is that absolute security is attainable. It’s only with the benefit of hindsight that it looks obvious that the so-called “dots” should have been connected.

Wednesday’s report cites the threat posed by “a group of nearly 10 non-Yemeni Americans who traveled to Yemen, converted to Islam, became fundamentalists, and married Yemeni women so they could remain in the country.” According to an unidentified US official, these converts are “blond-haired, blue-eyed types” who “fit a profile of Americans whom al-Qaeda has sought to recruit over the past several years.”

And why would Al Qaeda have sought to recruit them? Without a doubt, in order to defeat profiling….

A reporter for the Washington Post foreign service has spoken to a former bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, now working as a business consultant in Yemen after having been released from prison in that country. “Ask him whether jihadists should kill Americans on U.S. soil and he replies without hesitation, ‘America is a legitimate target.’”

Nasser al-Bahri, interviewed a few days before the Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt, says that, while he still admires bin Laden, he does not intend to resume a “life of jihad.” But a Yemeni political analyst speculates that such people, “if they find the country to be under attack from outside, they will find a legitimate reason to go back to jihad.”