Obama criticizes Ill. Congressman Kirk over profiling comments

Mark Kirk, a Republican congressman from Chicago's North Shore, is someone I've never met, but people I know have met him, and they think he's a great guy. Mark could've phrased this a bit better, but I hate to say it: Remember most of the terrorism in the world is committed by Muslims, as the GM of al-Arabiya commented last year.

Our government has a duty to protect its citizens.

From AP:

Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, the Senate's only black member, criticized another lawmaker from his state on Wednesday for published comments on discrimination against young Arabs.

GOP Rep. Mark Kirk was at an event last weekend at Northwestern University when he was asked about the difficulties of the visa process for immigrants. He was quoted by the Chicago Sun-Times as saying: "I'm OK with discrimination against young Arab males from terrorist-producing states. I'm OK with that."

"I think that when we look at the threat that's out there, young men, between, say, the ages of 18 and 25 from a couple of countries, I believe a certain amount of intense scrutiny should be placed on them," Kirk was quoted as saying. "I'm not threatened by people from China. I'm not even threatened by people from Mexico. I just know where the threat is from. It's from a unique place, and I think it's OK to recognize that."

Obama took issue with the comments, which Kirk has confirmed were accurate, according to the (Arlington Heights) Daily Herald.

Some more information on Kirk. He's a Naval Reserve intelligence officer who served stateside during Opreration Iraqi Freedom.

As for Barack Obama, perhaps he wants to go back to the Clintonian bad-old-days of security.

From a 2004 Heather Mac Donald column:

In 1997, government attorneys worried that a proposed anti-terrorism system for airlines might work too well. Although an early prototype of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I) assiduously avoided collecting information about a passenger's national origin, religion, race, or sex in assessing the risk that he might be a terrorist, civil rights lawyers in the Justice and Transportation Departments fretted that the system might still be "discriminatory." It still might pull aside "too many" people of Arab descent by looking at, say, frequent travel to the Middle East, among other risk factors.

Given the previous two decades of Islamic terrorism, such an outcome would have been appropriate. But the rights enforcers warned that airlines could face penalties if they selected more than three passengers of the same ethnicity for additional scrutiny on any given flight. So the prototype architects built random hits into their program to ensure that airline screeners would devote as much time searching Lutheran matrons from Minnesota as young men from Saudi Arabia.