Politically Correct Suicide

Paul Sperry has written an article entitled Politically Correct Suicide: Still No Subway Profiling, in which he says:

After a new series of subway bomb attacks in London, the mayor of New York announced yesterday that police will search backpacks and other bags carried by people boarding city subways.

But the passengers they single out will be picked at random without regard for their race or religion. There will be absolutely no profiling, Mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed.

Talk about politically correct exercises in futility.

Young Muslim men bombed the London tube, and young Muslim men attacked Bloomberg's own city with planes nearly four years earlier. Statistically, they fit the profile of the terrorist targeting the American transportation system.

And yet, still no profiling.

Authorities instead will single out people for special security screening as they do at the nation's airports. That means stopping Girl Scouts and grannies in a procedure that has more to do with demonstrating tolerance for young Muslim men than protecting citizens from them.

At the same time, the NYPD is advising subway riders to be alert for "people" with bulky clothes or fiddling nervously with bags. Could they be more general in describing the traits of an Islamic suicide bomber? They're too PC to narrow it to a level where it can actually be useful to Americans trying to protect themselves and their loved ones...

Don't expect the feds to be any more serious about screening Muslim suicide bombers on Amtrak, which pulls into two of the biggest commuter train depots in the country: Penn Station and Union Station.

Asked after the London bombings if the fed-run trains were safe, White House terror czar Fran Townsend claimed: "They're safer than they were after 9/11, they're safer after the Madrid bombings ... It's a lot safer."

What a crock. Not only is there no passenger profiling on Amtrak, there's no bag screening -- even after Madrid. The only restrictions on bags are a 50-pound weight limit, and that's no comfort at all. The London bombers used plastic explosives weighing less than 50 pounds.

Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and his Muslim-sensitive civil-rights team act as a bulwark against profiling at airports and train stations. One of Mineta's top aides is the son of a Wahhabi mosque leader who raised money for Osama bin Laden's No. 2 in Santa Clara, Calif.

So don't hold your breath for any policy changes there -- even if, as experts predict, as many as 20,000 casualties result from London-type bombs detonated in the New York MTA.

And that's not the only al-Qaida threat to mass transit that authorities are worried about. According to a closely held DHS security advisory I obtained, the "terrorists have designed a crude chemical dispersal device fabricated from commonly available materials, which is designed to asphyxiate its victims."

"The device produces cyanogens chloride (CLCN) gas and/or hydrogen cyanide (HCN) gas," continues the five-page document, first issued Nov. 21, 2003. "These gases are most effective when released in confined spaces such as subways."

And they are extremely deadly, experts say.

By not allowing police to profile the most suspicious train passengers, Bloomberg, Mineta and other leaders are not only unnecessarily inconveniencing millions of commuters, but unwittingly giving Muslim terrorists political cover to carry out their plans. Call it politically correct suicide.

Power Line writes:

Apparently lots of London Muslims think it's odd that people are looking at them funny:

[A spokesman for the Council] said in the current atmosphere Muslims were very afraid and other people were looking at them in a very suspicious manner.

Gosh, why would that be? Maybe I'm being unfair here, but it seems to me that a great many Muslims are refusing to face reality. For their sake as well as everyone else's, they need to get serious about helping the authorities root out terrorism, in England and elsewhere.