Theatrics vs safety

It's a fight to the finish. America's deep attachment to "treating everyone equally" vs. its responsibility to protect its citizens. Can both be done? We shall see. So far, the former is slightly ahead, as illustrated by the Mickey Mouse airport security measures that focus on things rather than people. This is quite different than the Israeli approach, as explained by Daniel Pipes in The Jerusalem Post:

HAD EL Al followed the usual Western security procedures, 375 lives would surely have been lost somewhere over Austria. The bombing plot came to light, in other words, through a nontechnical intervention relying on conversation, perception, common sense and (yes) profiling. The agent focused on the passenger, not the weaponry.

Israeli counterterrorism takes passengers' identities into account; accordingly, Arabs endure an especially tough inspection. "In Israel, security comes first," David Harris of the American Jewish Committee explains.

Obvious as this sounds, overconfidence, political correctness and legal liability render such an approach impossible anywhere else in the West. In the US, for example, one month after 9/11, the Department of Transportation issued guidelines forbidding its personnel from generalizing "about the propensity of members of any racial, ethnic, religious or national origin group to engage in unlawful activity." (Wear a hijab, I semi-jokingly advise women wanting to avoid secondary screening at airport security.)

WORSE YET, consider the panicky Mickey-Mouse steps the US Transportation Security Administration implemented hours after the Detroit bombing attempt: no crew announcements "concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks," and disabling all passenger communications services. During a flight's final hour, passengers may not stand up, access carry-on baggage nor "have any blankets, pillows or personal belongings on the lap."

Some crews went yet further, keeping cabin lights on throughout the night while turning off the in-flight entertainment, prohibiting all electronic devices and, during the final hour, requiring passengers to keep hands visible and neither eat nor drink. Things got so bad, the Associated Press reports, "a demand by one attendant that no one could read anything... elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter."

Widely criticized for these Clouseau-like measures, TSA eventually decided to add "enhanced screening" for travelers passing through or originating from 14 "countries of interest" - as though one's choice of departure airport indicates a propensity for suicide bombing.

The TSA engages in "security theater" - bumbling pretend-steps that treat all passengers equally rather than risk offending anyone by focusing, say, on religion. The alternative approach is Israelification, defined by The Toronto Star as "a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death."

Which do we want - theatrics or safety?