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[Peggy Noonan].We are in the middle of another systems failure.
We are busy for instance debating absurdities. Such as: In an era in which certain Arab and Muslim males roughly 18 to 40 years old are taking active steps to severely damage the United States and kill Americans, is it wrong to give added scrutiny to Arab and Muslim males 18 to 40 years old as they attempt to enter America, board planes, rent charter planes and ask for maps to the nearest nuclear power plant?
How absurd and clueless do you have to be to be having this debate? You have to have surrendered all common sense.
Here is my emblematic moment for the systems failure we are currently in--not the one that caused Sept. 11 but the one that continues, that we're in now. I was in an American airport a few months ago. I was in line with 30 or so people waiting to board a plane. I watched--we all watched--as an elderly couple, a man and woman in their 70s or 80s, were ordered out of line to be searched. They were old, frail, embarrassed. They stood 40 feet away from us, their shaky arms held wide as they were wanded by a low-wage worker not endowed with enough human grace to show them sympathy or respect. The old man and the old woman were forced to take their shoes off when everyone knew--we could see it--that it was hard for them.
It is a great regret of my life, and I am ashamed of it, that I did not attempt to intervene. I knew that if I did I, dangerous middle-aged American female terror threat that I am, would cause myself the kind of trouble that would mean missing the plane and disappointing my son, who was at home waiting.
So I did nothing, and in the end we were all allowed to board. But I will never forget that couple being searched, thanks to the heightened compassion of Norm Mineta.
Norm Mineta, our transportation secretary, has a searing memory, and that memory determines U.S. airport security policy in 2002. When he was a little boy at the start of World War II, Mr. Mineta and his Japanese-American family were sent to an interment camp. It was unjust and wrong. The Japanese of America in 1942 were American citizens, not illegal aliens or visitors newly arrived; moreover, they had never, not one of them, launched an attack on the United States. What FDR did to them was wrong.
But the facts of Japanese-Americans in 1942 do not parallel the facts of our enemies today. Our enemies has already killed civilians and announced they will kill more. We know who the enemy is--we know many names, and we certainly know the general profile--and we have every right, or rather duty, to give those who fit the profile extra scrutiny. Instead we play games and waste time wanding people we know to be innocent, and searching their tired old shoes. We do this to show we're being fair. But we really know otherwise, all of us.
We are being irresponsible and careless in the hope that history will call us tolerant and compassionate. It is vanity that drives us, not the thirst for justice and a safer world. Mr. Mineta has received many awards for his sensitivity to ethnic profiling. Good for him, but I'd personally give him an award if he'd begin to act like a grownup and recognize that his childhood trauma shouldn't determine modern American security policy.
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