Thread: Profile me, says Lebanese lawmaker from Waterbury

And from the same source the counter arguements :

Profiling proposal gets swift reaction

Friday, August 5, 2005

By Trip Jennings

Copyright © 2005 Republican-American

HARTFORD -- Critics of a Waterbury lawmaker's idea to authorize the profiling of Middle Easterners based on their ethnicity say it won't make America safer. If anything, such tactics would embolden extremists abroad.

Terrorists trying to recruit martyrs to die for a cause would need only to refer to Americans' treatment of Muslims and cite it as an example of injustice, representatives of local Muslim and national Arab American organizations said.

"Laws like this make my argument weaker when I go to other countries and say this is a country with values, with justice," said Saud Anwar, the president of the Connecticut chapter of the Pakistani American Public Affairs Committee who periodically returns to his hometown of Karachi, Pakistan.

James Zogby, president of the Washington-based Arab American Institute and senior analyst with polling firm Zogby International, said international polling done by his organization backs up Anwar's observation. How Arab and Muslim immigrants are treated here resonates greatly in the Muslim world, he said. What we consider small incidents here may play out as major scandals there. "We end up judging each other by the behavior of extreme elements," he said.

Rep. Selim Noujaim, R-74th District, a Lebanese Catholic, said this week he might propose legislation next year to subject Middle Easterners like himself to racial profiling by police. The responses he received Thursday did nothing to distract him from the goal. The vast majority of the dozen phone calls and a handful of e-mails he received applauded him for the idea, he said.

Noujaim, who came to the U.S. nearly 30 years ago from Lebanon, said he is prepared for the tradeoff of lost liberties for increased safety after seeing his native Lebanon plunge into a violent, decades-long civil war.


"If a policeman pulled a person over and roughed him up, that's not OK," Noujaim said. "But if a policeman pulls someone over and asks for identification, that's called for."

Even if his idea dies next year in the legislature, Noujaim said, he hopes it provokes a debate the state must have in the post 9/11 world over whether to recalibrate the balance between liberties and security in a world terrified of the next terrorist attack.

Many Western countries are now having that debate in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the train bombings in Madrid last year and last month's bombings in London, not always with success.

Some Muslims in England already worry that officers are using racial profiling in their search for terror suspects.

Noujaim's idea reverberated as far away as Washington on Thursday, where staff at the Arab American Institute had noted it by mid-morning before a reporter contacted the staff for reaction.

"It is a national debate that comes and goes," Zogby said. "We had the debate in the 1990s. The (U.S.) justice department resolved the issue by issuing a set of guidelines."

Those federal rules bear a resemblance to a 1999 Connecticut law that prohibits authorities from pulling someone over solely based on their race or ethnicity. The statute does allow police some latitude to make note of an individual's behavior, the way they dress and -- as one factor among many -- a person's race or ethnicity.

"I would suggest he talk to law enforcement authorities first and find that they don't want it," Zogby said of Noujaim. "Law enforcement is the ally. I don't think the American public really understands profiling. If you ask should there be profiling or not -- you get a split verdict."

Zogby said targeting an ethnic group for extra scrutiny, which he called crude profiling, ultimately is a bad law enforcement practice. "It creates a net too large and it wastes too many resources," he said. Also it breaks down the trust needed to do community policing, which is at the heart of all police work, he added.

There also is the question of how to single out a particular ethnic group for extra scrutiny.

"There are a lot of people from Puerto Rico who look like they are from Lebanon," said Rep. William Hamzy, R-Plymouth, who himself is Arab American and believes profiling people based on ethnicity would take Connecticut down a "slippery slope."

"It's a very difficult subject. We're talking about people's security and also about people's constitutional rights," Hamzy said. "But in the world we live in, I do recognize that a lot of people would feel comfortable in other people giving certain liberties in the exchange for feeling safer."

For now, Noujaim is prepared to proceed with his idea. "I think the debate will come," he said. "What happens now is that (my idea) raises awareness to be vigilant."

If they're looking for a redneck, I want them to profile me as well...