Could mandatory airport screenings for passengers from 14 "terror-prone" countries backfire? (Catch up on the mixed reactions to the new measures here.) Some liberal bloggers argue that national profiling would only succeed in alienating Muslims, on top of being an affront to dignity, while conservatives dismiss such concerns, arguing that compromising privacy is a necessary tradeoff for safety.

• Pat-Downs Don't Alienate "Oh, please," responds Heather Mac Donald at the National Review to the notion of "additional screening" as "stigmatizing and abusive ... We have all gone through airport pat-downs; only the most self-involved take them as a personal insult." She thinks too much fuss is being made over the additional measures, and says that "the people who will scream the loudest about the alleged civil-rights abuse will not be ordinary citizens but their largely self-appointed representatives." Mac Donald suggests the following script for President Obama:

"No, we don’t think that every Saudi or Yemeni is a terrorist. We know that the vast majority of citizens from the selected countries are peaceful, as will be the vast majority of travelers screened under our new program. But given the patterns of terror recruiting and the difficulties of obtaining and piecing together intelligence on that terror activity, we are taking non-abusive measures to protect flyers from those countries and the rest of world from an undetected suicide bomber until we are able to expose and eliminate the full extent of terrorist networks."

• Agreed: Normal People Aren't Offended  Jonah Goldberg, also of the National Review, makes a similar point, though his regards body scans, not profiling: "the average person already understands that privacy is something you have to compromise to fly."

• The Costs of Alienating Muslims  "Formal discrimination against Muslims (i.e., "profiling") is the hottest thing in National Review since segregation went out of style," writes progressive Think Progress's Matthew Yglesias. But while profiling might "[minimize] the risk that someone would blow up an airplane next week," Yglesias argues that the "strategic costs of becoming a country that engages in systematic formal discrimination against Muslims are rather high."

• And Make No Mistake: It Will Alienate Them  Spencer Ackerman says the new rules "exhibit all the signs of racial profiling without forthrightly admitting that's what it is." He contrasts President Obama's earlier speeches to the Nobel audience and to the Muslim world, in which he mentioned the importance of "tolerance and the dignity of all human beings," with what Ackerman calls the "dignity and the justice of being pulled out of line and strip searched for a bomb hidden in your anus because you share, in the broadest possible sense, the same faith or heritage as a group of murderous criminals."

• A British Perspective: How to Profile  Writing across the Atlantic Ocean, where the debate over alienation is particularly fierce, the Guardian's Chris Hume comes down between the two sides:
  

The profiling of passengers based purely on race, for example, would be invidious. It would also be deeply counter-productive as it would be likely to alienate the very communities on whom we rely for intelligence about terrorists, and as witnesses if we are to secure convictions. If profiling merely means particularly diligent searches of people with a recent travel itinerary that includes Waziristan, Somalia and the Yemen, there cannot surely be an objection.

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Heather Horn