Profiling the World

Profiling is extrapolation of information about something, based on known traits, qualities, distinctive features or characteristics, and tendencies of the object of observation. Based upon the observed characteristics or behavior, the profiled object is then targeted accordingly. There are various kinds of profiling, including consumer profiling, offender (or criminal) profiling, racial profiling, etc.

In case of racial profiling, the racial or ethnic traits and distinctive features or characteristics are taken as a necessary condition and valid grounds for subsequent racial discriminatory actions or policies against the people who display such traits, distinctive features or characteristics. Therefore, the necessary condition that is needed for a racial profiling to take place is the existence of certain consistent racial discriminatory policies in the first place. Unless any such racially or ethnically discriminatory policies are in place, there is no racial profiling as such. There is something else that is taking place there.

The Nazi Germany had a clearly pronounced official policy of racial discrimination of the Jews and other ethnic minorities back in the 1930s. They used racial traits and distinctive features or characteristics in order to profile people according to those policies. If a person had distinctive features of a Jew he or she did not have to commit any crimes in order to be punished. Having those distinctive features was enough to be treated as a criminal. The racial features in themselves constituted the profiling qualities and served as a basis for the racial profiling as a result of the state’s racist political agenda. Racial discrimination invariably precedes racial profiling. Not the other way round. Unfortunately, racial profiling is sometimes confused with criminal profiling. As a result, policies that ensue from criminal profiling are sometimes mistook for policies usually employed by people who hold racially discriminatory views. Given the significance of the human factor in such cases, abuses are possible during the criminal profiling policies. But the general purpose of such policies is entirely different from that of racial profiling and that is why offender profiling needs to be taken into consideration more seriously.

There is a general misunderstanding of what criminal profiling is and how it differs from racial profiling. Offender profiling, also known as criminal profiling, is a behavioral and investigative tool that is intended to help law enforcement agencies to accurately predict and profile the characteristics of unknown criminal subjects or offenders. Criminal (or offender) profiling is based upon analysing the traits, qualities, distinctive features or characteristics, and tendencies of the criminals. That can help investigators learn more about the personal features of that kind of perpetrators in order to prevent similar crimes in the future. Offender profiling is also known as criminal profiling, criminal personality profiling, criminological profiling, behavioral profiling or criminal investigative analysis.

Offender profiling also includes geographical profiling as another method to profile an offender. Criminal investigative analysis is necessary in order to provide law enforcement with a social and psychological assessment of the offender. There are four main approaches to offender profiling: geographical approach; investigative psychology; typological approach; and clinical approach. All these methods are necessary to provide a thorough analysis of the type/nature of the criminal act, which is then compared to the types of people who have committed similar crimes in the past.

In-depth analysis of the actual crime scene is also part of the offender profiling process. The victim(s)’s background and activities are analyzed, to look for possible reasons and connections. The possible factors for the motivation of the crime are analyzed. The description of the possible offender is developed, founded on the detected characteristics, which can be compared to with previous cases. All these measures, necessary to find perpetrators and prevent other crimes, are taken in the process of the offender profiling, which in modern criminology is called the "third wave" of investigative science. The first wave is the study of clues, pioneered by Scotland Yard in the 19th century. The second wave is the study of crime itself. The third wave is the study of the psyche of the criminal.

Various methods involved in the process of the offender profiling, including geographical profiling and psychological profiling, are needed in order to find the criminal(s) and make sure that they get their punishment for their crimes. Besides, offender profiling is needed to prevent people with qualities, distinctive features and characteristics similar to those of the known criminals from committing similar crimes.

Unfortunately, such characteristics can be misleading, making people who can not help having them a more likely target of increased attention and investigation. Keeping a high profile in such cases involves a certain degree of personal responsibility on the part of the individuals who happened to be the target group, high marked as a result of offender profiling. Especially when present law enforcement policies are preceded by a series of such grave crimes as a mass murders, including as a result of terrorist attacks. The complexity of the situation and the novelty of the nature of the crimes contribute a great deal to the difficulty of the crime-fighting mission on the part of the law enforcement, making it personally a much more daunting task to handle by the people directly involved in policing.

Current anti-terrorist activities have been carried out in a multicultural environment that makes it particularly difficult, if not impossible, for the law enforcement to provide a reasonable level of public security, especially in large urban areas all around the globe. Given the amount of responsibility on the part of the law enforcement personnel in a situation like this, sometimes, racially-biased policing occurs when the law enforcement obviously considers race or ethnicity in deciding with whom and how to intervene in an enforcement capacity. Such practice, usually involving occasional inappropriate racial or ethnic consideration, is referred to as racial profiling. But, unless such activity ends up in treating an innocent person as if he or she was a criminal, according to appropriate offender profiling, it is not. Under the circumstances, racial consideration is professionally indispensable. The degree of appropriateness of such consideration differs depending on the situation at hand.  But, racial consideration, no matter how grievous it could be, does not equal racial profiling as we know it.

One of the most recent examples of the predicament in which the modern multicultural western society has found itself once it has become a target for terrorist attacks by an increasing number of militant-minded members of the Muslim community is the event that took place at the WorldFest/Houston International Film Festival. The latter is bearing a self-proclaimed mission to "promote cultural tourism" and "add to the cultural fabric of Houston". But it has got under fire after a last weekend confrontation sparking accusations of ethnic profiling and cultural insensitivity.

As the 46th annual festival entered its closing weekend on Saturday, guests at a professional seminar at the Marriott Westchase were greeted by the an emergency alarm that interrupted WorldFest founder Hunter Todd's introductory remarks. The class evacuated the room only to find out it was a false alarm.

Both Todd and festival attendee Mike Rudd, a University of Houston communications student, agreed that a female University of Houston student with her face covered by a hijab veil and niqab cloth entered the room as people returned to their seats . . . But the agreement stops there.

"From the corner of my eye, I saw this individual in a beautifully colorful hijab. You couldn't see anything but her eyes," Todd says, adding the woman entered the room by herself. (Rudd says she was not alone, just sitting next to an empty seat.)

Todd says: "What made me concerned was the big black backpack she was carrying. To be blunt, the Boston bombings were only five days earlier. It was very much on my mind after the manhunt on Friday."

Todd, a military veteran, says he called a friend in law enforcement for advice and followed a recommendation to check the woman's backpack and credentials. The person showed her Gold Pass, which the festival gives to area university students, and opened her bag to reveal several large bottles of water.

As Todd restarted his introduction, Rudd stepped up to angrily accuse him of improperly profiling the woman — who remains unnamed — due to her Muslim background.

Meanwhile, Todd says he was only concerned about his festival's guests that morning and that he would have done the same with anyone carrying a large black bag. Todd says he conferred with several Houston police officers and a former FBI agent after the incident and feels he made the right decision given the situation.

Racial profiling, as a precursor to or a sign of possible racially discriminatory policies in general, can be identified only when there is an obvious use of an individual’s race or ethnicity as a sole factor in articulating reasonable suspicion to stop, question or arrest an individual by law enforcement personnel. That is, unless race or ethnicity is part of an identifying description of a specific suspect for a specific crime.

In case of the recent terrorist attacks in major European and American cities by the members of the international Muslim community, race and ethnicity, as well as clear cut religious affiliation, are definitely part of an identifying description of certain specific suspects for very specific crimes.

Although racial profiling, technically speaking, does not take place anywhere in Europe or the U.S., as a result of the respective law enforcement agencies’ investigative activities, the Muslim community does feel targeted as it is increasingly being considered to be a nursing ground for most of the modern day terrorist groups and paramilitary fighters the world over. That is a problem that the Muslim leaders in various countries need to take seriously.

To their credit, the Muslim communities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe have risen to the challenge. Many imams and scholars openly challenge jihadist ideology claimed to be largely behind the terrorist attacks. In the event of the Boston marathon tragedy, national and local Muslim organizations have publicly condemned the bombings. "Those responsible for the terrorist attacks in Boston must face justice," said the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, or CAIR. "Any act of violence against innocent people is deplorable and is condemned in our faith." "These are acts of crime, not acts of religion," said Benjamin Abdul-Haqq, an imam at Washington DC's Masjid Muhammad mosque. A spokesman for the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center said he could "never recognize these criminals as part of my city or my faith community."

Many of those interviewed also expressed fear of public reprisals, in a sentiment that echoed the mood for some following 9/11. "We're very concerned, because in past instances some individuals have decided to go out and target further innocent people because they look different or belong to a faith that is a minority," said a CAIR official. The Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Muslim Peace Coalition USA also condemned the Boston bombings and extended condolences to victims and their families.

The largest Muslim civil rights group in the country, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, even asked Muslims to offer authorities any leads that they may have. Moreover, in an interesting twist, mosques refused to arrange Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s janaza (Islamic funeral prayers). In fact, a number of fatwas (religious opinions) have been issued recommending that prominent individuals and imams not lead his janaza. Imam Suhaib Webb, a nationally recognized cleric from Boston, said: “I don’t think I could ethically lead a prayer for him, but I would not stop people from praying upon him.” The intent behind that was to send a clear message to potential terrorists.

The funeral of one of the Boston attackers was posing a new challenge for the Muslim community as several mosques shied away from conducting the service.

"I would not be willing to do a funeral for him," Imam Talal Eid of the Islamic Institute of Boston, told Huffington Post. "This is a person who deliberately killed people."

Muslim organizations in Canada are also trying to dispel the public perception of the Muslim people as potential terrorist sympathizers by actively assisting the authorities in finding the culprits of some of the past criminal activities. A tip from a Toronto imam sparked an investigation recently that culminated in the arrests of two men who had allegedly plotted to derail a Via passenger train. The imam alerted authorities more than a year ago about a person he regarded as an extremist who was corrupting youth in his community. That single tip led to what the RCMP called the first-ever Canadian bust of an alleged al-Qaeda terrorist plot in the country.

Despite such proactive measures, some self-proclaimed experts continue to pin collective blame on Muslims, citing the “radicalization” of the Muslim community. In fact, some Islamophobes the world over have the audacity to claim that overwhelming majority of the mosques in America and Europe are controlled by radical imams and serve as incubators of “homegrown” terrorists.

There is no credible evidence to support such bald assertions. On the contrary, the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security at Duke University released a study in February titled “Muslim-American Terrorism: Declining Further,” which concluded that Muslim terrorism was not a significant threat. It had claimed 33 lives since Sept. 11, 2001, compared with 200 victims of far-right terrorists and 180,000 murders. The Center has also documented the active role of Muslims in combating terror in the US. The same can be said for Canada.

Moreover, as national security reporter Spencer Ackerman noted, “In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans.” This is twice the number from Muslim-American terrorism in the 11 years after 9/11 leading up to the Boston tragedy.

Muslims must not be held collectively responsible for the alleged actions of criminals among them. They are not. Technically speaking, just as offender profiling is not actually racial profiling, the official policies and general public sentiments in local communities are not directed against Muslims. Nonetheless, the U.S. and European mass media continue to propagate “news” and “commentaries” creating a simmering anti-Muslim atmosphere. After the U.S. and British intelligence officers have openly admitted that they had literally created, trained, and supported the Islamic military fighters, under the codename of “Al-Qaeda”, which in Arabic means simply “Database”, in order to fight the Soviet contingency forces in Afghanistan back in the 1970s and the 1980s, and continue to do so as they are trying to use “fundamental” Islamists as foot soldiers to fight U.S. and British wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, there is no doubt that most of the so called terrorists, who claim to have ties to Islam or Al-Qaeda, are either some kind of pathetic patsies or misguided Muslim “warriors” who, after having being fed and trained on the U.S. Dollars, have gone tragically rogue.  

It seems to be ironic that the Western media outlets, which are on the payroll of the same corporate entities that have been paying the Al-Qaeda leaders of the terrorist groups fighting in Tunis, Egypt, Lebanon, and even Syria, have now begun their information attacks against the Muslim world, describing all the Muslims as potential terrorists. The CIA, MI6, and other intelligence agencies, which are serving the interests of the U.S. and British financial and corporate entities, are solely responsible for most, if not all, of those terrorist attacks that have taken place over the past decade. They have radicalized part of the world’s Muslim community and turned some of them into war-machines, a bunch of mindless fanatical bloodthirsty Islamic extremists, who are nothing but human drones, operated from Washington.

Those same people, who had all along secretly created a monster out of impoverished desperate people in Afghanistan and Pakistan, brainwashed and zombied them, turning them into killing machines, gave them money and weapons, and provide them with extensive informational and logistical support even to date, have the audacity to use the mainstream media outlets to portray all Muslims as killers and “breeders” of terrorists.

The powers behind the creation of Islamist terrorist groups, including the notorious Al-Qaeda network, which in reality exists as an identifiable entity only in the imagination of those involved, are the powers behind the recent anti-Muslim and Islamophobic mass media campaign.  Even at the domestic level, both the U.S. and most Western European governments have been on an undeclared witch hunt. Muslim charities are being unfairly targeted, Islam and its symbols are unnecessarily made into an issue and intelligence harassment is rampant. Such activities, strongly propagated by the media, seem to be intended to create a vicious cycle of marginalization, distrust and blowback in today’s Western society.

In the US, between 2010 and 2012, lawmakers in 32 states introduced bills to expressly ban Islamic law, and seven states - Oklahoma, Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Idaho, and Tennessee - enacted such bills into law. Not surprisingly, many commentators have documented that those bills were essentially a solution looking for a problem. In fact, those laws have created additional challenges for some women who sought to advance their rights. Department of Justice (DOJ) figures also suggest that anti-Muslim “zoning bias,” where towns refuse to grant building permits for mosques, has become a growing problem.

In the Canadian context, some have questioned the timing of the arrests (especially given that there was no imminent threat), which appears planned to push through The Combating Terrorism Act that would revive some provisions of Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act which had “sunsetted” after a five-year period. The bill, passed two days after the arrests, revived two draconian provisions that had expired: preventive detention for three days without charges and “investigative hearings” under which a suspect who refuses to testify before a judge could be imprisoned for up to a year, as well as new restrictions on travel.

The FBI has documented a dramatic spike in anti-Muslim hate in the U.S. and this cannot be pinned on the average American. Nor can it be accounted for by any other than the U.S. mainstream media, which implicitly holds all Muslims collectively responsible for the crimes among them. That mass media belong to those same people, who had created Islamic terrorism and who continue to support Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and Central Asia.

It is very strange, because not all communities have been overly blamed for the acts of the criminals among them. No other community has been put in such an unenviable position. Italians, for instance, are not asked to condemn the actions of the Mafia or held collectively responsible for its atrocities. Nor were the Irish asked to apologize for the actions of the Irish Republican Army. Nor were the Spanish people held collectively accountable for the Basque separatist organization (ETA) in Spain that used terrorism in its campaign for an independent Basque state.

Why are the Muslim people being treated in this way, then? The whole nations are being treated as if they are supposed to bear collective guilt for what some of their people had done. Why is it so? The most startling example of another such nation, which had to bear collective stigma of responsibility and guilt was Germany. For almost half a century the Germans had been reminded of the crimes and terrorist activities of the Nazi State back in 1930s and the 1940s. That was not just a collective guilt but a stigma stereotype of anti semitism and  barbaric war mongering that the German people were inculcated and had to live with after the end of the WWII. The U.S. and British mass media and mass culture outlets had done a lot to create and support that image of the Germans. To this day, that stigma is still there.

History is an amazing thing, if you care to look into it! Now, if you look into who were behind the Nazi Germany’s rising as a military industrial power in Europe back in the 1930s and who were those people, who had used Germany to unify and militarize Europe, by whatever objectionable means possible, regardless of millions of innocent lives that were sacrificed a result of that, and to urge Hitler to attack Russia, you will find out that those were the same people, who later, after the war was over, would use their mainstream media to stigmatize all the Germans as collectively responsible. Does it not ring the bell? The terrorist state of Nazi Germany had been invested into and supported throughout the 1920s and the 1930s by the same U.S. and British corporate and financial leaders (the Bush family among them), with the help of their respective intelligence agencies, who had first used the German people condoning the racism and state terrorism of the Nazi regime, and after the war, created and propagated a meme that the German people were collectively responsible for all those crimes. Very convenient, isn't it?

Now, that the president B.H. Obama has declared, speaking on the war on terror, that “... this war, like all wars, must end”, we can presume that the people, who have used Muslims as terrorists in the Middle East for the past decade or so, are now ready to discard them. It is not clear yet what will happen to the currently fighting Islamists. As to the Muslim community in general, they are going to be, like the Germans back in the 1940s, stigmatized and labeled as barbarians and terrorists, and held collectively accountable for all the terrorist acts that had been perpetrated over the past twenty years. They are going to be inculcated with the same sense of guilt and remorse that the Germans had and then have lived with to this day. The peoples of the world will be eyeing the Muslims askance, with suspicion, holding them collectively responsible for all the past and present crimes, for dozens of years ahead. The Muslims will not be able to do anything about it and they will have to live with the sense of collective guilt.

P.S.

Such is the price that the Muslims in the U.S. and most Western European countries will have to pay to get a place in the 21-st century, where there is no place left for “organized religion”, as it has been stated by the “masters of history”...