Last year's Fort Hood shooting and foiled Christmas underwear bomber set off another chorus of support for racial profiling: specifically, targeting Muslim-looking people. Here, for example, is the unreconstructed Republican senator James Inhofe:
"I know it's not politically correct to say it — I believe in racial and ethnic profiling. I think if you're looking at people getting on an airplane and you have X amount of resources to get into it, you get at the targets, and not my wife. And I just think it's something that should be looked into.... when you hear that not all Middle Easterners or Muslims between the age of 20 and 35 are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims or Middle Easterners between the age of 20 and 35, that's by and large true."
Or Republican representative from Long Island, Peter King:
"100% of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?"
In fact it wasn't true – the Unabomber? – but that argument looks even less plausible now that the existence of "Jihad Jane", Colleen LaRose, has been revealed. As the New York Times describes her:
Ms LaRose is white, with blond hair and green eyes, according to the law enforcement official, who was not authorized to share details of the case and spoke only on the condition of anonymity. The official said Ms LaRose was born in Michigan and later lived in Texas and Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.
