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Is my 12 year old daughter really a terrorist threat?

Mark Pack has cleverly highlighted the perceived threat that vegetarians pose to society. The Government has discovered that there are certain patterns of behaviour that may lead to someone being a terrorist – and one of those is ordering an in-flight vegetarian meal. That puts my 12 year old daughter up there with the worst of them. Until now, I’d thought that her greatest threat to civilisation was playing heavy rock music with the windows open!

Having only read about this in the Daily Mail, I can’t say whether the profiling has been of terrorists who have tried to blow up planes originating from the UK (which are quite a small number), terrorists in general or whether the profiling is assuming a threat only from Muslim terrorists with connections to the Middle East and South Asia. Certainly from the other information in the Mail, it seems it is assuming the latter, as it states:

“A previous history of travel to the Middle East, Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran will also trigger an alarm, as will those with a record of sponsoring an immigrant from any of these countries.”

Many of the comments that I have seen on the web approving of the government’s system claim that this is a valid method of profiling. But not only are the numbers of terrorists miniscule, the number of vegetarians is huge. There are millions of vegetarians (around 7% of the population and double that for young people aged 14-25 years), so a lot of innocent lentil lovers will be targeted. The important question is not how many terrorists order a vegetarian meal on a place (a tiny number in a miniscule sample) but how many of those ordering vegetarian meals on plans are terrorists?. The answer to this must be so small as to simply through up thousands of false positives and leave the authorities spreading their nets so widely as to miss the real threats.

Most airlines now offer Halal and indeed Kosher meals. So a Muslim can eat Halal meat. When we flew long-haul last Autumn, we were offered a huge range of options, including vegetarian, lacto-vegetarian and vegan. But if Muslim terrorists are now ordering vegetarian meals rather than Halal to try and throw the authorities off the scent, what is to stop them ordering the ‘standard’ meat meal, but not eating the meat? After all, they wouldn’t be the first people to find an in-flight meal inedible! Are anti-terrorist air stewards going to enforce a ‘clear your plates’ policy?

So if you think the government is one lentil short of a dahl, you can do the following:

1. Share this issue on your blog, web site or Twitter – or just by good old fashioned word of mouth. The more people who know about the story, the better.
2. Join the Facebook groupand share it with your friends on Facebook.
3. Back the Liberal Democrat Freedom Bill campaign. As Mark says, it’s true that the Bill doesn’t explicitly contain a clause protecting the rights of lentil eaters, but it is about rolling back the sort of crass and ineffective Big Brother policies of which this is the silliest extreme. Go to http://freedom.libdems.org.uk/petition/ and sign up. Then email 10 of your friends to encourage them to sign too.

Related posts:

1. Lies, damned lies and recipes
2. Beef in port
3. Neither drunk, nor disorderly