Reacting to Reaction to Trump Racial Profiling Remarks, Israelis Try to Explain Need to Profile

The maelstrom of reaction to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s call for racial profiling to be used liberally in the fight against terror has prompted Israelis to, in effect, defend Trump’s position. Interviewed on CBS’s Face the Nation, for example, Israeli transportation minister Yisrael Katz explained the need to focus on a specific ethnicity by saying that, “”Ultimately these (security) apparatuses … must build a profile of characteristics as to where the danger comes from and locate it.” He went on to say that, “It is not the whole population, but sometimes when there is a specific form of terrorism, you can seek out Islamic terrorism only among Muslims.” In Israel, unlike the US, security focuses on profiling the threat, seeking it out from wherever it is found. Nevertheless, regarding the use of racial profiling in the US, Katz insisted to his interviewer that, “The United States does do this, by the way, beyond the debate over whether they refer to terrorism as ‘Islamic’ or do not refer to terrorism as ‘Islamic.'”