Those tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoners, über-conservatives like Laura Ingraham, Michelle Malkin, and Michael Savage (née Weiner) like to shame Americans for qualms we might have about racial profiling. Given their way, zeroing in on Middle Easterners would be the bedrock of our country's security policy. After all, soft liberals who've never had a syndicated radio show have no concept of the evil we face. They can't get it through their woolly heads that political correctness has no place on the battlefields our cities have become.

Those weren't Belgians or Poles flying the planes into the twin towers! They were shifty-looking Arab Muslims named Mohammed and Aladdin and whatnot. Use your heads you bunch of pussies!

Look, I'll be honest... If it were up to me, I'd racially profile with gusto. Seriously, I would. (In certain scenarios it makes indisputable sense, and the PC police can suck on it.) And I'd like to point out that I look fairly Middle Eastern myself on account of being part Jewish, part Spanish, and God knows what else. So I'm precisely the kind of person who would be penalized with an extra few minutes of scrutiny at airport security checks on the basis of sheer swarthiness. Granted, the perceived indignity might be worse were I actually an Arab or a Muslim but you get my point.

When things were really tense after 9-11 I did, in fact, receive considerably more attention than other people, both at home and while abroad. Once on a KLM flight out of Taipei I was not-so-casually questioned by a series of flight attendants trying to gauge whether I was "cool." And you know what? I couldn't have been happier. (And not just because I felt like I was being cruised by a series of statuesque Dutch blondes.) Racial profiling has always made obvious sense to me. Sometimes when I pass through security without arousing at least a modicum of suspicion I feel a little queasy. Especially when I haven't shaved for a day or two, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine me looking right at home in a jaunty green Hamas headband and matching grenade sash. Who else is slipping through their fingers?

Just when I had become strange bedfellows with Michelle Malkin (God I love politics) on the issue of racial profiling, along comes Rafi Ron. Rafi Ron is no politically correct pussy. Unlike Laura Ingraham or Dr. Weiner, he identifies and kills terrorists for a living. The guy has more than 30 Years of Israeli Government experience in the areas of counter-terrorism, special operations, and intelligence services. As former Chief Security Officer of the Israeli Airport Authority, Ron was responsible for all security operations at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, Israel. More recently he co-founded New Age Security Solutions, a hot-shot security consultancy.

Mr. Ron first caught my attention when he appeared on CNN and warned of the consequences of relying on racial profiling. While conservative media figures are quick to claim that political correctness motivates such thinking, Ron operates on the simple premise that Al Qaeda is busily recruiting operatives who play against type. In other words, the zealot who carries the suitcase bomb into the Capitol could look a lot more like Ron Howard than Omar Sharif. (Come to think of it, Sharif credibly played a Russian in Dr. Zhivago and a Nazi officer in Night of the Generals so racial profiling wouldn't have stopped the wily Egyptian screen idol anyway.)

Like Ron, Norman Shanks, a former security chief at London’s Heathrow Airport, also rejects so-called “racial profiling,” saying it can actually diminish security by diverting attention away from potential threats. Both Shanks and Ron prefer a system of "behavioral profiling," which focuses on "the cues and body language that signal criminal or terrorist activity.” While these experts are not suggesting that we utterly discount race as a component of the overall profiling process -- nor are they permitting their security teams to get lazy by responding solely or even primarily to racial stimuli.

So maybe there's more to this security business than brute racial profiling. But most pundits never even bothered to quiz an expert before forming their opinions on the topic.

Our resources are limited. We cannot scrutinize everyone. The American airline industry couldn't survive if we took the time to do so. So we must rely on the cleverness of those experienced in the art and science of identifying real terrorists to prevail in this horrible game.

Does this mean we shouldn't scrutinize Arab males more than we do soccer moms from Atlanta? ...Uh, that doesn't sound right either. The massive amount of traffic in our airports forces us to play the odds to some degree. And guess what? This time it's the olive-skinned folks' turn to answer a couple two-tree more questions. I consider it an act of patriotism to comply with a smile. (One day, maybe it will be your turn for some reason or other.)

If all that Al Qaeda has to do to penetrate our defenses is recruit a suggestible lad with freckles and a strawberry thatch of hair, and we spend all our time shaking down Pakistani cardiologists... then we have only ourselves to blame for our racial myopia.