Beware anti-Muslim hysteria.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Comment

The hysteria has begun. With the attempt to bring down that Northwest jet flying into Detroit on Christmas, the urge to profile Muslims and demonize Islam is becoming irresistible for some--especially those on the right.

Retired General Thomas McInerney went on Fox to say, "We have to use profiling. And I mean be very serious and harsh about the profiling.... If you are an eighteen-to-twenty-eight-year-old Muslim man, then you should be strip searched."

McInerney didn't make any effort to hide his hatred of Islam, which he called "an ideology, not a religion."

Sarah Palin didn't even wait for Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. She was ready to engage in profiling after the Fort Hood murders, saying the military had fallen victim to "political correctness" and instead should "profile away."

Radio host Mike Gallagher put it crudely: "There should be a separate line to scrutinize anybody with the name Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed."

And Representative Peter King of New York chimed in, tautologically: "100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslims, and that is our main enemy today. So why we should not be profiling people because of their religion?"

Because it's un-American.

We're not a free country when we stop people at the airline gate and demand to know their religion.

We're not a free country when we automatically assume that a national or religious identity is cause for suspicion.

There are hundreds of thousands of African Americans who are Muslims. Should they all automatically be suspect?

There are almost two billion Muslims worldwide, and the overwhelming majority do not support Al Qaeda. Should they all automatically be suspect?

The presumption of collective guilt is what led to the Japanese internment camps. It is wholly antithetical to our Bill of Rights.

T he Obama Administration's new TSA policy is also overly broad and misguided. It orders everyone who is a citizen of any of the fourteen nations (thirteen of which are Muslim, with Cuba thrown in for camouflage) on its list to get a full-body pat-down or a body scan. A nine-year-old girl from Lebanon deserves a pat-down? A ninety-year-old Algerian man traveling with his grandchildren needs a body scan?

It also orders anyone, including U.S. citizens, flying from those countries into the United States to get extra scrutiny.

By relying on such a crude tool for divining terrorism, the U.S. government is going to be searching through endless haystacks. And it's not as though Al Qaeda doesn't...