Could you imagine if the government had prohibited consideration of ideology (Nazi leanings) in identifying possible internal threats during WWII? That’s exactly how many critics might analogize new rules handed down by Attorney General Eric Holder that hamstring the FBI, rules disallowing the use of religious factors in the pursuit of terrorist suspects. In other words, all other things being equal, Muslims must be viewed as no more likely to carry out terrorist attacks than are Catholics, Jews, Presbyterians, Methodists, or Episcopalians.

This was brought to light by Steven Emerson, head of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, while a guest on Fox News’ Justice with Judge Jeanine earlier this month. Emerson, who has said that ISIS is “Al Qaeda 3.0” and that it already has a US presence and is planning terrorist attacks, warned that the new domestic rules of engagement (disengagement?) imperil every American. As he explained to show host Jeanine Pirro:

The FBI [has been constrained by] the Department of Justice…. If someone was a religious extremist, though they didn't plot to carry out an attack, that [indicator] could not be factored into an investigation … into identifying them as a potential threat to the United States. Therefore, they [law enforcement] would have to wait until they actually plotted to carry out an attack. Well, that's too late. And unfortunately, what we're seeing right now is the fact is that we've seen massive numbers, increasing numbers of volunteers going over not just from Europe, from Asia and Africa, but we're seeing ISIS recruiting biophysicists, engineers, social media types, people who have expertise in really carrying out sophisticated terrorist attacks coming back to the United States.

Thus, since the FBI’s focus can’t be on mosques as terrorist breeding grounds, there’s freer rein for jihadists’ focus on them as terrorist recruitment centers. Emerson continued:

There's one recruiter that [had been] ... picked up [in the past], well identified, in Bloomington, Minnesota at the Al Farooq Mosque. There are recruiters going around the country in other mosques, where they identify potential volunteers. They test them out to see if they're willing to die on behalf of martyrdom of the cause for Allah. Then they give them cash, they provide money for their families in case they die. They give them tickets to go to Turkey. Turkey has allowed them, hundreds, to go through to Syria, then to Iraq. And we [the U.S.] count Turkey as one of our top allies. We haven't put [many of] them on the terrorism watch list, which we should. So there's a major disconnect, Judge, here between what we should be doing to protect the homeland and protect American citizens versus what the president is doing.

And Emerson knows whereof he speaks, being the FBI’s “go-to guy” for information on terrorism. Describing his triumphs and status after speaking to the expert, American Thinker’s Karin McQuillan writes:

Emerson runs the country’s top data center on Islamic terror groups in the United States, working like a man possessed, and accomplishing the work of thousands on sheer guts and determination to protect our country.

Wherever the bad guys have been caught and prosecuted successfully, you will find Emerson working quietly behind the scenes as an invaluable ally of the FBI and Homeland Security. Because he accepts no money from the government, Emerson has been free of the diktats of the Obama administration that have forbidden the FBI to train their sights on Muslim terrorists.

Yet Holder’s new rules may mean that some of the world’s most dangerous terrorists won’t be caught and prosecuted successfully. As McQuillan also wrote, “The chief danger Steven Emerson sees is that there are three to four hundred ISIS killers in Syria and Iraq with American passports, who can return whenever they want, and the Obama administration is blocking the FBI from monitoring them in mosques.” He went on to tell American Thinker that ISIS already is in the United States, “and the only reason there has not been a terror attack is that they have not decided to do it yet.”

And what inspires the Obama administration’s new rules? They’re part of an obsession with eliminating unfashionable “profiling,” but many critics point out that this effort is not only destructive, but also illogical because profiling is something that everyone does — and must do — continually. For example, economics professor and social commentator Walter Williams has explained that profiling is simply a way to determine probabilities based on easily observable traits in situations in which the cost of obtaining more information is too high. Providing some real-world examples in 2010, Williams wrote:

Pima Indians of Arizona have the world's highest diabetes rates. With knowledge that his patient is a Pima Indian, it would probably be a best practice for a physician to order more thorough blood glucose tests to screen for diabetes. Prostate cancer is nearly twice as common among black men as white men. It would also be a best practice for a physician to be attentive to — even risk false positive PSAs — prostate cancer among his black patients. What about physicians who order routine mammograms for their 40-year and older female patients but not their male patients?

… Because of a correlation between race, sex and disease, the physician is using a cheap-to-observe characteristic, such as race or sex, as an estimate for a more costly-to-observe characteristic, the presence of a disease. The physician is practicing both race and sex profiling. Does that make the physician a racist or sexist?

And political correctness cannot cause this aspect of reality to suddenly suspend itself. As Williams wrote in an earlier piece:

Just as race and ethnicity are not perfect indicators of the risk of certain diseases, neither is race a perfect indicator of criminal activity, but they are associations, and people act on those associations.

A Washington, D.C., taxicab commissioner, who is black, issued a safety advisory urging D.C.’s 6,800 cabbies to refuse to pick up “dangerous looking” passengers. She described “dangerous looking” as a “young black guy … with shirttail hanging down longer than his coat, baggy pants, unlaced tennis shoes.” By no stretch of imagination does every young black person pose a threat to taxi drivers, but in Washington, D.C., and other cities, there’s a strong correlation between race and the threat of robbery/murder.

Moreover, even the staunchest opponents of “racial profiling” can’t help but practice it. As activist Jesse Jackson said years ago, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps … then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.”

And all sorts of correlations exist. Blacks and Hispanics perpetrate 96 percent of all crime and 98 percent of gun crime in NYC. On the other hand, points out Roy Huntington at PoliceMag.com, “When white club owners were primary participants in the Ecstasy trade, that's who the cops were arresting. Ditto for ... white ‘biker’ gangs engaged in the meth trade…. Cops go where the crime is.”

Or, at least, sometimes they do, anyway — when political correctness isn’t taking precedence over saving lives.