US citizen Jamie Paulin-Ramirez detained in connection with alleged conspiracy to kill Danish cartoonist !
Daniel Nasaw in Washington and Henry MacDonald, Ireland correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 14 March 2010 21.18 GMT
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez. Photograph: AP
The use of racial profiling as a counterterrorism tool has been fatally undermined after a second white American woman was arrested over an alleged Islamist murder plot, critics of the policy said today.
Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31, a nursing student from Colorado, was detained in Ireland in connection with an alleged conspiracy to kill a Danish cartoonist. News of her arrest came days after Colleen LaRose, 46, of suburban Philadelphia, was named in a federal indictment for her alleged role in the plot against Lars Vilks, who had offended many Muslims with his portrayal of the prophet Muhammad as a dog.
Paulin-Ramirez, described by her mother as a lonely woman who had "got sucked in" to extremism, was released this weekend without charge. LaRose has been in custody in the US since October.
The two women join a young Nigerian, a fair-haired North Carolina man and his sons, a US army psychiatrist of Palestinian descent, and others who have been accused in the past year of perpetrating or plotting Islamist violence.
And this year, American-born, non-Muslim anti-government protesters flew a plane into a government building in Texas, killing a worker, and shot at the Pentagon, wounding two police officers.
Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said: "It shows that racial profiling is ineffective, as we've always said."
In the years since the 9/11 attacks, US conservatives have encouraged racial profiling as a counterterrorism tool.
The Republican senator James Inhofe said in January: "If you're looking at people getting on an airplane and you have X amount of resources to get into it, you need to get at targets, not my wife."
As a white woman of European descent, the senator's wife, Kay Inhofe, has a racial profile exactly matching those of Paulin-Ramirez and LaRose, who converted to Islam and allegedly posted comments on the web under the alias "Jihad Jane". Paulin-Ramirez, dubbed "Jihad Jamie" in the US media, converted to Islam last year and became estranged from her family.
This week, the liberal chatshow host Rachel Maddow poked fun at racial profiling. "We are now looking for anyone who is a man, a woman, an American, an African, a Middle Easterner, an eastern European, a western European, a blond, a brunette or between the ages of 20 and 49, which by my calculation leaves only one being on planet Earth above reproach and that is Alf", referring to a TV show alien.
http://www.guardian.co.uk / Bulgaria today
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