Profiling air passengers by nationality

Nigerians are being unfairly smeared as terrorists, said Nigeria’s The Guardian in an editorial. Merely because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the terrorist who tried to detonate a bomb in his pants on a Christmas Day flight to Detroit, is Nigerian, the U.S. has included our country on its list of “security risk states.” From now on, anyone with a Nigerian passport—along with Afghans, Algerians, Cubans, Lebanese, Libyans, Iranians, Iraqis, Pakistanis, Saudi Arabians, Somalis, Sudanese, Syrians, and Yemenis—will face tougher screening before boarding U.S.-bound flights. The measure is outrageous. There’s no evidence that Abdulmutallab had any support from anyone in Nigeria. He was radicalized in the U.K. and trained in Yemen. How can the U.S. justify discriminating “against more than 150 million people because of the criminal conduct of one person?”

The failed bombing is just an excuse to further stigmatize Muslims, said Ali Boukhlef in Algeria’s La Tribune. Of the 14 countries on the new watch list, all but Cuba have large Muslim populations. Many of us are already “acquainted with the zeal of Western police forces when they face a Muslim.” One can assume that “the monitoring, in particular of the body, will certainly involve humiliation.” Ever since 2001, when the so-called war on terror was declared, it has been a “war on Muslims and their religion.”

“I don’t blame the Americans,” said Anjum Niaz in Pakistan’s Dawn. After all, the “crazy people from across the globe” who have been trying to bomb them have, in fact, been Muslims. Some of them were from Pakistan. So yes, from now on, Pakistanis flying to the U.S. will be patted down and questioned. “I don’t think we should take this personally. No one wants a suicide bomber sitting next to you in the plane—even if he were a Pakistani.”

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Of course, none of us wants to get blown up, said the United Arab Emirates’ Gulf News. But the only way to ensure safety is to screen every passenger. The failed shoe bomber, remember, didn’t come from one of the 14 countries blacklisted: He was British. But the U.S. evidently didn’t want to pay to screen everyone, so it resorted instead to “racial profiling.” Demonizing certain nationalities won’t make the skies safer. It is pure “xenophobia—and must be rejected by all right-thinking peoples.”