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"This kind of thing must be intelligence-led, not appearance-led," said Bunglawala. |
LONDON — British Muslims have reacted angrily at government plans to single out passengers at airports for security checks based on ethnicity and religion, saying that such a "terror profile" mounted to racism.
"Before some kind of religious profiling is introduced, a case has to be made; and we are certainly not convinced by the arguments for this kind of profiling," Inayat Bunglawala, spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain, told the Guardian on Tuesday, August 15.
According to media reports, the Blair government is discussing with airport authorities a system of profiling — where security staff focus their search efforts on people they regard as suspicious on grounds such as ethnicity and religion.
Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, created controversy Monday when he called for "passenger profiling" on flights.
Writing in the News of the World, he said airport chaos could be cut by more rigorous checks for "young Muslim men".
Stevens said that similar procedures had made Israeli airports the "safest in the world".
Bunglawala asserted that Muslims are not an ethnicity.
"There are many white converts to Islam," he told the British daily.
The controversy aroused after police arrested last week 24 British-born Muslims, mainly of Pakistani origin, under suspicion of planning to blow up airliners bound for the United States with liquid explosives disguised as drinks.
Police have obtained a judge's permission to hold 23 people until Wednesday while the 24th has been released.
The suspects can be held for up to 28 days without charge under new anti-terror powers which came into force last month.
Alienating
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| "If you treat a community as a problem community, you are not going to get support from them," said Abdul Bari. |
Muslim leaders believe that if approved the new measures would only widen the gap between police authority and British Muslims, estimated at 1.8 million.
"What you are suggesting is that we should have a new offence in this country called 'traveling whilst Asian'," Metropolitan Police Chief Superintendent Ali Desai, one of Britain's top Muslim police officers, told the BBC Monday, August 14.
"What we don't want to do is actually alienate the very communities who are going to help us catch terrorists," he said.
Muhammad Abdul Bari, the general secretary of the umbrella MCB, same a similar message.
"If the profiling is done on the basis of race and religion, it will be wrong, it is not going to work," he told Sky News.
"If you treat a community as a problem community, you are not going to get support from them."
Bunglawala said that many Muslims already felt "unfairly targeted" because of their appearance, and that some form of profiling was already in effect.
"This kind of thing must be intelligence-led, not appearance-led ... I hope the government has thought very carefully about this."
Many British Muslims accuse the police of unfairly targeting their community in their terror crackdown after last year's suicide bomb attacks on London's transport system by four home-grown Muslims.
British Muslim leaders had denounced in unison the grisly London attacks which killed 56 people, saying there was no justification whatsoever to take innocent lives.
Since 2000, police have arrested over 700 people - many of them Muslims — under tough anti-terrorism laws but have brought only a handful to court. The vast majority have been released without charge.
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