SANITY, NOT BIGOTRY, CALLS FOR PROFILING.

Byline: CHRIS WEINKOPF

SOMETIMES, words of wisdom come from the least likely of sources - a fortune cookie, a small child, Dianne Feinstein.

Appearing last week on CNN's ``Late Edition,'' California's senior senator, a Democrat, offered the most thoughtful and honest perspective on the subject of ethnic-profiling to come out of Washington since Sept. 11. Unlike the Bush administration, which absurdly maintains that race, religion and national origin should play no role in how airport security personnel identify potential terrorists, Feinstein spoke with a candor that's been missing at the higher levels of U.S. government.

``If you take a look at it,'' the senator said, ``at this stage, at least, one isn't going to look for blond Norwegians.''

No kidding. Nor, for that matter, is there much reason to fear that Mormons, Japanese tourists, paraplegics or little old ladies en route to Las Vegas are going to hijack jetliners and crash them into buildings. Yet Bush administration policy has been to treat self-evidently nonthreatening airline passengers no differently from young, Middle Eastern, Muslim males, even though only members of the latter group have declared a jihad on the American people.

No - it must be said these days, lest one be branded a bigot - not all Arabs are terrorists. And no, no one should be mistreated or harassed on the basis of faith or ethnicity. But prudence dictates that, because airport-security workers lack the time and the resources to thoroughly scrutinize, search and question every potential passenger trying to board an airplane, discretion is necessary. Extra attention must be paid to those statistically most likely to pose a threat.

That rules out giggling teen-age girls and Mrs. Bailey's fourth-grade field trip to the nation's capital. It points, instead, to those with demographics and backgrounds similar to those of the 19 murderers who crashed four American jetliners on Sept. 11 and to those of the thousands more who have passed through al-Qaida training camps: Middle Eastern, Muslim men, ages 20 to 40.

These aren't, of course, the only suspects. In Israel, Palestinian terrorists have recently taken to sending out female suicide bombers because they are less likely to arouse suspicion. There may also be more John Walker Lindhs or, for that matter, Timothy McVeighs out there looking to harm their own country. Demographics are hardly the only relevant criteria when it comes to profiling potential terrorists, but they are valuable, and the government's refusal to use them puts American lives, including innocent Arab-American lives, at risk.

Like Feinstein's words of wisdom, political correctness has also come from the least likely of sources since Sept. 11 - from the ostensibly conservative Bush administration. It has thwarted an obvious bit of sound, factually grounded policy.

John Ashcroft, the much loathed, sworn foe of self-proclaimed civil libertarians, said back in September that he was ``against using race as a profiling component,'' even as a method of screening airline passengers. When an Arab-American who turned out be a member of the president's Secret Service detail was kept from boarding a commercial flight, President George W. Bush averred that he would be ``madder than heck'' if the agent's ethnicity played a role in the detainment.

Then there's Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, a holdover from the Clinton administration whom Bush, in an effort to sound a bipartisan tone at the beginning of his presidency, named to his cabinet. Mineta, a son of Japanese immigrants, regards the mere hint of ethnic profiling as the first step toward internment camps. Asked once on ``60 Minutes'' if elderly white women and young Muslim men should be treated the same at the airport security gate, he astonishingly replied, ``Basically, I would hope so.''

Feinstein, on the other hand, has shown the sense and courage to disregard the politically correct orthodoxies and to state the obvious.

In her CNN interview, she noted that such orthodoxies may have contributed to the bureaucratic letdown before 9-11. The ``whole debate of racial profiling,'' the senator remarked, ``played a role in the reticence of the FBI ... to really move ahead'' with the so-called Phoenix memo about Middle Eastern students at American flight schools. FBI agents disregarded their own better judgment, in part, for fear of drawing allegations of racial insensitivity.

That, of course, was before Sept. 11, which, in all its grisly horror, was supposed to mark the death of political correctness. With a war under way and a nation united, petty bouts of hypersensitivity were thought to have come to an end, allowing Americans to speak openly and honestly about the dangers ahead and freeing government to do whatever necessary to foil the next attack.

It didn't turn out that way, save for a few brave souls - chief among them, Feinstein.