It's The Profile, Stupid

Lefties, please excuse Charles Krauthammer for thinking clearly:

The American response to tightening up after London has been reflexive and idiotic: random bag checks in the New York subways. Random meaning that the people stopped are to be chosen numerically. One in every 5 or 10 or 20.

This is an obvious absurdity and everyone knows it. It recapitulates the appalling waste of effort and resources we see at airports every day when, for reasons of political correctness, 83-year-old grandmothers from Poughkeepsie are required to remove their shoes in the search for jihadists hungering for paradise.

The only good thing to be said for this ridiculous policy is that it testifies to the tolerance and good will of Americans, so intent on assuaging the feelings of minority fellow citizens that they are willing to undergo useless indignities and tolerate massive public waste.

Assuaging feelings is a good thing, but hunting for terrorists in this way is simply nuts. The fact is that jihadist terrorism has been carried out from Bali to Casablanca to Madrid to London to New York City to Washington by young Islamic men of North African, Middle Eastern and South Asian origin.

This is not a stereotype. It is a simple statistical fact. Yes, you have your shoe-bomber, a mixed-race Muslim convert, who would not fit the profile. But the overwhelming odds are that the guy bent on blowing up your train traces his origins to the Islamic belt stretching from Mauritania to Indonesia.

Yet we recoil from concentrating bag checks on men who might fit this description. Well, if that is impossible for us to do, then let's work backward. Eliminate classes of people who are obviously not suspects.

We could start with a little age-pruning -- no one under, say, 13, no one over, say, 60. Then we could exempt whole ethnic populations, a list that could immediately start with Hispanics, Scandinavians and East Asians. Then we could have a huge saving, a 50 percent elimination of waste, by giving a pass to women, except perhaps the most fidgety, sweaty, suspicious-looking, overcoat-wearing, knapsack-bearing young woman, to be identified by the presiding officer.

You object that with these shortcuts, we might not catch everybody. True. But how many do we catch now with the billions spent patting down grandmothers from Poughkeepsie?

You object that either plan -- giving special scrutiny to young Islamic men, or, more sensitively, just eliminating certain demographic categories from scrutiny -- will simply encourage the jihadists to start recruiting elderly, Norwegian women.

OK. We can handle that. Let them try recruiting converts, women and non-usual suspects for suicide missions. That will require a huge new wasteful effort on their part. And, more important, by reducing the pool of possible terrorists from the hundreds of millions to the, at most, tens of thousands, we will have reduced the probability of an attack by a factor of 10,000. Those are far better odds at far less cost to us in money and effort. And infinitely less stupid.

What Could Happen Here

In the brief period since the 7/7 attack, there has been a lot of pundit rumination on whether what happened in London could happen here. The fact is that what could -- and probably will -- happen here will be much worse. In his column a year ago, Charles Krauthammer summarized it well:

There is no gradualness and there are no countermeasures to a dozen nuclear warheads detonating simultaneously in American cities. Think of what just two envelopes of anthrax did to paralyze the capital of the world's greatest superpower. A serious, coordinated attack on the United States using WMDs could so shatter the United States as a functioning advanced industrialized society that it would take generations to rebuild.

The chances of stopping this civilization-shattering attack are looking increasingly slim. Yet we must go down fighting. Here's my partial list of what we should be demanding from our government:

Strict, wartime-level control of our borders, including military patrols, an Israeli-style fence, and sustained, redundant and comprehensive immigration law enforcement.

A sensible policy of ethnic and religious profiling for would-be entrants to the US.

The willingness to use coercive means, including military, to eliminate the North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats, and the other nuclear threats that are sure to arise.

More should be done, but these would at least be a start.

The World War II generation was the last one to achieve psychological adulthood. If its members were running our country, these steps would have been implemented on 9/12/2001. True adults know they must face challenges, not hide from them.

Are there enough adults left to save our civilization? Probably not, but the odds against success do not absolve us of the moral obligation to fight for its survival.

Update: Michelle Malkin's new column contains her agenda. Including that:

A true state of "heightened alert" would mean immediate deportation of illegal aliens from terror-sponsoring and terror-supporting nations, increased National Guard dispatches on both the northern and southern borders, aggressive police-federal cooperation to catch illegal border crossers and overstayers on the interior, and vigorous encouragement of volunteer border security efforts like the Minuteman Project.

Don't Go About Your Business

Today, in response to the 7/7 attack, US public officials will of course once again tell us to fight Al Qaeda by going about our normal lives, to demonstrate we are not frightened by terrorism.

I disagree. If we continue to "go about our normal lives," we're dead. Today, interrupt your normal life and tell your elected representatives what you think about this, this, this and this. Links for doing so are here.

Yes, we need to defy the jihadists by continuing with our lives. But our foremost duty is to fight, to burn the evil out from our midst.

Become informed. Act. Don't be normal.

Atrocious Yes, Surprising No

No one should be surprised* that Al Qaeda has managed to attack London, home of the infamous Finsbury Mosque and posters celebrating the "Glorious 19" 9-11 hijackers. We are too soft on our jihadists here in the US, but in Britain the situation is ridiculous.

If the Brits want to respond properly, they should double their troops in Iraq, wish them good hunting, and increase by tenfold their efforts to kill and capture the jihadists who are so at home within Britain's own borders.

I hope this attack serves as a warning to the US, but then again we have been warned before.

It will be interesting to see if the MSM reports on the inevitable delight and celebrations among the "Palestinians" and other Arabs and Moslems at the murder of infidel children.

*via Jihad Watch