'Mapping' A Danger

Homeland Security: Los Angeles police want to map potential terror hotbeds in the Muslim community, but critics are crying "religious profiling." Actually, it's just smart law enforcement.

And it couldn't come at a better time. The FBI is warning police in Los Angeles, as well as Chicago, that shopping malls there are possible targets of a new al-Qaida plot.

By mapping the local Muslim community, the LAPD would increase its chances of disrupting such plots. Its counterterrorism unit hopes to ID areas that might be more isolated and removed -- and therefore riper targets for radicalization and even al-Qaida recruitment.

Shining a spotlight on these neighborhoods would take the terrorists and their facilitators out of the shadows where they prefer to operate.

"We just don't know enough about the communities," explains deputy LAPD chief Michael Downing, adding that the planned mapping project "has nothing to do with profiling."

But predictably, the ACLU has joined CAIR and other Muslim groups in denouncing the move.

"The mapping of Muslim communities seems premised on the faulty notion that Muslims are more likely to commit violent acts than people of other faiths," the ACLU complained.

Tolerant as this may sound, it ignores overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary. Just since 9/11, more than 9,000 separate violent acts have been carried out in the name of Islam.

As Islamic terror expert Robert Spencer points out, we don't "see Presbyterians blowing themselves up in crowded restaurants, Buddhists flying planes into buildings and Amish waving placards crowing that they will soon dominate the world."

If the authorities ignored this reality just to appease the civil liberties crowd, they'd be committing politically correct suicide on behalf of the people they're charged with protecting. And civil rights are of no use to charred bodies.

You'd think patriotic Muslim groups would jump at the chance to cooperate in such a mapping project, which is supported by 69% of Americans, according to a CNN poll.

It's in the moderates' best interest to help police expose the extremists.

That way police can narrow their surveillance and gather more useful intelligence to protect not only society at large but also moderate Muslims who eschew violence.

The police are not the enemy here.

They know that the Muslim community is not monolithic or homogenous, especially in L.A., which is home to the second-largest Muslim population in the U.S. They know that it contains harmless Sufi mysticists, as well as Shia and Sunni quietists, who neither support nor act out on jihad.

But police need to identify the pro-jihad Salafists -- the radical fundamentalists -- living among them who do pose a threat.

And the moderates can help them do it. They shouldn't let themselves be used by certain self-serving Muslim-rights groups looking for another false issue and inflammatory headline.