Common sense regarding ethnic "profiling"

I'm a libertarian kind of guy, so I'm opposed to racism in any guise, but I can't agree with racial and ethnic minorities who object to profiling per se. This doesn't mean I agree with all profiling, but I do think that sometimes it has to be done.

Since terrorism by Middle Eastern Islamic extremists seems to be the biggest threat right now, it only makes sense to treat it that way.

Liberals will argue that there's nothing stopping the terrorists from using little old ladies or men of white European heritage to carry out their missions. One has to note that (a) this hasn't happened yet and (b) these terrorists do it for religious reasons so that dying in the act seems to be one of the major motives for doing it in the first place.

When little old ladies and European-looking businessmen start blowing themselves up or diverting airliners into skyscrapers, it will be time to profile them, but until then profiling the young, middle-eastern-looking male seems to be the rational thing to do, even though it has an unsavory "feel" to it.

Stopping or thwarting terrorism is a top priority and the resources which can be applied to it are limited, so until resources are unlimited and everyone can be profiled (if that's what we would really want to do!) or unless we don't want to profile anyone and just roll the dice, I'm afraid that racial/ethnic profiling makes a lot of sense.

Now, stopping cars based on the fact that an African-American male is driving a beamer (the offense referred to as "driving while black") does not make sense and does intrude into the rights of law-abiding black folk in an unreasonable way. That is the sort of profiling we should worry about.