On March 21, the Young Americans for Freedom at Penn State were handing out fliers featuring pictures of Osama bin Laden as a suicide bomber, which urged passersby to support the "necessary evil" of racial profiling to prevent terrorism. Aside from the fact that this pamphlet was obviously playing on people's fears of terrorism to rally support, it inaccurately suggests that racial profiling works.

After the Oklahoma City Bombing, Timothy McVeigh was given time to flee the scene because officials were searching for "Arab terrorists." In the same vein, the Washington, D.C. snipers were able to get through several roadblocks with the murder weapon because authorities believed the suspect to be a white man. John Walker Lindh was an American, white, middle-class man who was also a member of the Taliban, and Richard Reid, the "shoe bomber," was a British citizen of West Indian descent. Clearly there are no cookie-cutter criteria for who can and can't be a terrorist. Therefore, racial profiling is not effective and not a necessary evil, and we should not excuse this human rights violation in any form.