How many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?

Daniel Pipes notes that lots of people now favor ethnic profiling of Muslims in airports, including 55 percent of Britons and the editors of the Wall Street Journal. But, he continues,

the chances of Muslim-focused profiling being widely implemented remain negligible. As the same Wall Street Journal editorial notes, “the fact that we may have come within a whisker of losing 3,000 lives over the Atlantic still isn’t preventing political correctness from getting in the way of smarter security.”

Noting the limited impact that losing 3,000 lives had in 2001 and building on my “education by murder“ hypothesis—that people wake up to the problem of radical Islam only when blood is flowing in the streets—I predict that effective profiling will only come into effect when many more Western lives, say 100,000, have been lost.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 22, 2006 01:28 PM | Send