In recent days, the right has worked themselves into hysteria over the TSA’s new, more invasive screening protocols, with right-wing media magnate Matt Drudge breathlessly hyping the latest video of an intrusive pat down, and Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips demanding the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. While the TSA has promised to revise the methods to make them less intrusive, many conservatives have turned to one of their favorite solutions to the national security threat de jour: ethnic profiling.

In separate interviews on the radio show of the far-right birther website World Net Daily, Reps. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) both called for profiling as a means to better address the threat to air travel. Chaffetz specifically advocated for ethnic and religious profiling, though he said those traits shouldn’t be “solely” considered:

HOST: Is [profiling] something that you would advocate?

CHAFFETZ: Absolutely. Well, now that it’s become an outrage and people say, well we still need to secure an airline, how do we do that? Two things need to happen. One is profiling. Not based solely on someone’s religion or based solely on someone’s race.

In an interview today, Hoekstra — who is the ranking Republican member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence — also gave an passionate endorsement of profiling:

HOEKSTRA: The words profiling are toxic from a political standpoint. But the bottom-line is there are certain parameters that you can use in profiling that would narrow the scope of who you really target. … But it only makes sense to do some type of profiling so that you can focus the resources where they need to be focused. So we should consider it. … Sure, profiling is okay. You know, you do it everywhere in life — it only makes sense. You just need to make sure you do it right.

Listen to a compilation of Chaffetz and Hoekstra:

While these GOP lawmakers provide legitimacy, as Media Matters notes, conservative media figures have led the effort to use “the public backlash against airport security screenings as an opportunity to renew their calls for racial profiling.” Conservative Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer lamented, “The only reason we continue to do [pat downs] is that people are too cowed to even question the absurd taboo against profiling.” On Fox and Freinds last week, in his typically simple fashion, host Steve Doocy commented, “I like the idea of the profiling.” Meanwhile, right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh said, “There’s a simple way to stop this stuff; it’s called profiling.” And in an editorial, the conservative Washington Times complained, the “TSA believes an 80-year-old grandmother deserves the same level of scrutiny at an airport terminal checkpoint as a 19-year-old male exchange student from Yemen.”

As is the case with Chaffetz and Hoekstra, the conservative argument is predicated on the notion that profiling is “enormously successful,” as Fox News host Sean Hannity put it. But in reality, this is not the case. Aside from the obvious civil rights concerns with ethnic or religious profiling, the practice is actually “probably worse than random screening in the real world” at defeating terrorists, a mathematical analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science last year found.

Indeed, recent terror suspects undermine the notion that terrorists “all look alike.” Shoe bomber Richard Reid was a white, Jamaican-born British citizen; underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutalla was Nigerian; and “Jihad Jane” Colleen Renee LaRose, who was arrested in March on charges that she wanted to “wage violent jihad,” was a “petite” blond-haired, blue-eyed 46-year-old American woman.

Because of the problems in creating a mold, profiling “diverts precious law enforcement resources away from investigations of individuals…who have been linked to terrorist activity by specific and credible evidence…[and] ignores the possibility that someone who does not fit the profile may be engaged in terrorism.”

If conservatives don’t believe the data, they need only ask former Bush Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has called profiling “misleading and, arguably, dangerous.”

Following Senator Jon Kyl’s (R-AZ) announcement last week that he will delay and obstruct the New START treaty, many in the media presumed that START was all but dead. Yet the White House, knowing that it is now or never for the START treaty, doubled down and put its credibility on the line demanding a vote now. The move was risky, but in the last week, Democrats, the nation’s major newspapers, members of the military and even many Republicans have publicly denounced Kyl and Senate Republicans for their START objection.

The administration demonstrated the high level bipartisan backing for the treaty when it brought former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of State and Defense to the White House, including Republicans Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft. On the Sunday shows this past weekend, Admiral Michael Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs emphasized that the military of the United States wants this treaty ratified right now. This has highlighted that Republicans are rejecting the advice of military leaders. At the NATO Summit in Lisbon last week leaders from East, Central, and Western Europe all came out in unanimous support for the treaty and called on the Senate to ratify. Finally, the President used his weekly address to emphasize the need to ratify the treaty and attacked Republicans for wanting “to trust but not verify.”

In the last week, 17 editorial boards in states from all over country like Utah, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Missouri, Maine, Texas and Iowa, have eviscerated Kyl and Senate Republicans for their obstruction. The Louisville Courier called Kyl’s move an “outrage.” Kyl was described as “narrow-minded,” politically “craven,” and as putting forth “lame excuses.” The New York Times even said Iran should send Kyl a “thank you note.”

The presumption over the last generation has been that when it comes to national security debate, progressives always lose. But following the foreign policy disaster of the Bush administration, the country simply doesn’t trust Republicans on national security. An ABC/Washington Post poll taken right before the election showed that Americans trust Democrats more on national security 45 percent to 40 percent for Republicans. Given that 73 percent of Americans support the New START treaty, according to a just released CNN poll, the stance of Kyl and Senate Republicans is proving incredibly unpopular.

Here is what 17 newspaper editorial boards around the country are saying: Read more

Last year, South African Judge Richard Goldstone released his report to the UN Human Rights Council documenting what he believed to be war crimes committed by both the Israeli military and Hamas forces during the 22-day long “Operation Cast Lead” conflict in Gaza in 2008.

One of the charges that Goldstone made was that Israeli troops used Palestinian civilians as human shields during operation, and last October, an Israeli court convicted two Israeli soldiers “of using a Palestinian boy as a human shield” during the 2008 offensive. The court’s “ruling said the two soldiers inappropriately ordered a 9-year-old boy to open bags they thought might contain explosive material.”

Today, the Israeli military court that convicted the two soldiers handed out its sentencing. It decided to give both soldiers a three-month suspended sentence and to demote both of them, who were staff sergeants, to the rank of sergeant:

Two Israeli soldiers have each received a three-month suspended sentence for forcing a nine-year- old Palestinian boy to open bags during the Gaza war in January 2009. The military court in the south of Israel also demoted the two staff sergeants, who were from the Givati infantry brigade, to the rank of sergeant. It also ruled that the offence will be noted in the men’s criminal records.

The soldiers, together with relatives and supporters, celebrated after the sentence was passed down, relieved that they were free and would be able to serve in the military reserves as commanders.

”Now all we want is to get plane tickets and to join our friends, who are waiting for us abroad. We’ve gone through something terrible and we just want to forget about it all,” said one of the two convicted soldiers after the sentencing was handed down. ”We were worried it would all end with jail time, but now we can relax.” Meanwhile, Israeli President Shimon Peres will reportedly “consider a request to pardon two soldiers,” removing any sort of mark on their records.

“If an Israeli child was exposed to the same thing, the whole world would have turned against us, but when it’s a Palestinian child, nothing happens,” said Majed Rabah, the boy who was taken captive by the soldiers. “Do the Israeli authorities think that a three-month suspended sentence is an appropriate punishment for two heavily-armed soldiers treating a nine-year-old boy as a human shield?” replied Gerard Horton, “a spokesman in the West Bank for Geneva-based rights group Defence for Children International,” in response to the sentencing.