Israeli minister says US already profiles Muslims, defends practice

A senior Israeli minister on Monday charged that the United States already profiles Arabs and Muslims in its airports, amid calls by Donald Trump to adopt the controversial practice.

“The US does do [profiling], regardless of the argument if they say Islamic terror or they don’t say Islamic terror, unlike the Europeans who really don’t do it,” Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz said, referring to the controversy surrounding US President Barack Obama’s decision not to define the Orlando terror attack as Islamic terrorism.

During a briefing with reporters in his Jerusalem office, Katz defended profiling Muslims in some cases.

“We’re at war” with an enemy that has a “murderous ideology whose goal is to basically overthrow western civilization,” Katz said. “Our intelligence networks and Interior Ministry networks have to profile.”

Though Katz freely admitted that Israel practiced profiling, the transportation minister said new detection systems would make it unnecessary in the future.

“We’ve added a number of technological tools to limit the interaction between the checkers and the checked so that we don’t have to profile,” he explained.

Katz, who in addition to serving as transportation minister also serves as intelligence minister, stressed that he was not accusing the entire Arab or Muslim population of terror, but said: “Islamic terrorism, you can only look for it among Muslims.”

This was necessary to protect “the entire population, including the Arab population,” he said.

Yet in Israel, this practice of profiling recently drew criticism after an Arab photographer was forced to strip down to his underwear in order to enter an event with the prime minister. In the days following the incident, other Arab Israelis shared similar stories of invasive searches.

However, Katz said, because of these practices, Israel has one of the best protected airports in the world.

Earlier this month, some 45 countries from around the world came to Ben Gurion International Airport to learn how Israel defends its air terminal, he said.

“There are a lot of threats, at the planes, at the airports,” Katz said. “People come here to learn the Israeli practices.”

In an interview aired Sunday on CBS, Trump said profiling was a matter of choosing “common sense” over “political correctness,” in the age of international terrorism.

Trump’s comments came in a discussion on the Orlando nightclub massacre by shooter Omar Mateen, who was Muslim, and past comments by Trump to the effect that if elected president in November he “respectfully” would place mosques under surveillance.

African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims and other minorities in the United States have complained bitterly for decades about the practice, in which police use a person’s race, religion, national origin or ethnicity as grounds for suspecting them of committing a crime.
Trump was asked point-blank if he was talking about increasing profiling of Muslims in America.

“Well, I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump said.

“Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads,” he added.

A spokesman for Israel’s Airport Authority denied the use of profiling at their facilities, stressing to AFP that “Israel conducts the same security checks to the luggage and bodies of all passengers.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report