Atheist Sam Harris Reiterates Support For Profiling Of Muslims At Airports

[rug]

Harris: 'Imagine how fatuous it would be to fight a war against the IRA and yet refuse to profile the Irish'



The HuffingtonPost UK | By Paul Vale
Posted: 15/09/2015 16:46 BST
Updated: 1 hour ago

NEW YORK -- Atheist and public intellectual Sam Harris defended his call for profiling at airports in an interview with Ora.tv this week.

The neuroscientist, who has penned several books on religion, including "The End Of Faith" and "The Moral Landscape," said that not everyone boarding an airplane deserves the same level of scrutiny because members of the security team are looking for “suicidal jihadists.”

“We’re not looking for 80-year-old women from Okinawa,” he told host Dave Rubin. “We’re not looking for little girls from Norway. If Jerry Seinfeld’s going to the airport, [and] he gets the same search that someone who looks like Osama bin Laden does, that’s a crazy misuse of resources.”

Harris continued: “When you see a famous celebrity go through security treated as though he just may have become a jihadist when no one is walking, it’s crazy. It is security theater. And there are many people who, though not famous, are every bit as unlikely to be members of al Qaeda as prominent people -- Betty White.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/15/sam-harris-racial-profiling-muslims-airports_n_8140318.html

"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim"

4:50 video at link.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

1. Sam does not like him some Muslims.

I've only read one of his, 'The End of Faith' I think it was, and you could tell he was not a fan from that one.

[MisterP]

2. here's the RawStory original

http://www.rawstory.com/2015/09/sam-harris-defends-profiling-muslims-jerry-seinfeld-shouldnt-be-treated-like-someone-resembling-bin-laden/
doesn't make any more sense (if you talk out both sides of your mouth you can disclaim what you've just proposed): the sort of terror that "they all look the same and need to be profiled" is fighting the terror that "they could look like anybody and we're already infiltrated"; both the sides aren't just wrong, but fail on identical terms

at least he's pushing the liberal atheists away from his lot (interestingly they seem to pretend to be Old Left against the dang hippies whose softness let the turrsts in and don't wanna attack Iraq), and I welcome the rise of a non-Coultergeist atheology to go with Bernista Christianity

and how does he want to separate Seinfeld from the 9-11 guys? nose proportions? a shredded Quran at each x-ray machine? everyone's in Y-haplogroup J1 so bloodwork's out

besides, the TSA's mostly looking for horse anyway: that's also why the observation balconies were closed off in the 70s, since the lookout would stand around all day and hand-signal the ticketed courier who the plainclothesmen or mules were

[longship]

3. Sam, it does not work.

Just ask the Israelis! And ask the security experts, like Bruce Schneier. He calls it security theater. It accomplishes nothing and may even make us less secure.

Sam, you are being a naive doofus.

[Humanist_Activist]

4. He's a fucking idiot, has he seen the variety of muslims out there?

Also, who looks Muslim?

He seems to be judging Muslims looks the same way anti-Semites stereotypically profile Jews. Not every Jewish man has curly hair, bushy beard and a yarmulke on their head.

ON EDIT: To reiterate, its a fucking religion, not a race. Jesus fucking Christ on two popsicle sticks ignorant fuckers like him annoy me to no end. You would think someone who gets paid to think, seriously that's what philosophers do, right? Anyway, you would think fuckers like him would have more than two brain cells to rub together and actually think before they speak, otherwise you come off as a fucking unhinged, bigoted idiot.

The fact of the matter, Mr. Sam Dumbass Harris, Muslims can look just like that old lady in Okinawa, or Mr. White Whitington from Salisbury, because its a fucking religion, not a fucking race.

Not to mention the inherent discrimination in racial profiling.

[Dorian Gray]

5. This

100% this.

[Jim__]

6. I can hardly believe the deep insight shown by Sam Harris. (sarcasm, of course)

Sure Sam, we should only check people who look Muslim.

From wikipedia - my bolding:

The Lod Airport massacre[1][2][3][4] was a terrorist attack that occurred on May 30, 1972, in which three members of the Japanese Red Army recruited by the Palestinian group called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-External Operations (PFLP-EO),[4][5] attacked Tel Aviv's Lod airport (now Ben Gurion International Airport), killing 26 people and injuring 80 others.[6] Two of the attackers were killed, while a third, Kōzō Okamoto, was captured after being wounded.

The dead comprised 17 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, a Canadian citizen, and eight Israelis, including Professor Aharon Katzir, an internationally renowned protein biophysicist, head of the Israeli National Academy of Sciences, and a popular scientific radio show host, who was a candidate for the coming Israeli presidency, and whose brother, Ephraim Katzir, was elected President of Israel the following year instead.

Because airport security was focused on the possibility of a Palestinian attack, the use of Japanese attackers took the guards by surprise. The attack has often been described as a suicide mission, but it has also been asserted that it was the outcome of a larger operation (the particulars of which remain unpublicized) that went awry. The three perpetrators—Okamoto, Tsuyoshi Okudaira, and Yasuyuki Yasuda—had been trained in Baalbek, Lebanon; the actual planning was handled by Wadie Haddad (a.k.a. Abu Hani), head of PFLP External Operations, with some input from Okamoto.[7] In the immediate aftermath, news magazine Der Spiegel speculated that funding had been provided by some of the $5 million ransom paid by the West German government in exchange for the hostages of hijacked Lufthansa Flight 649 in February 1972.[8]