An effective approach to homeland security finds terrorists based on the actions of individuals, not their religion. Targeting a single religious or ethnic group simply overloads already swamped intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Additionally, as we have seen with a number of recent cases, there is no single “profile” of a terrorist or would-be terrorist. Recent cases include individuals as diverse as “Jihad Jane,” a white middle-aged woman who converted to Islam and traveled to Sweden to participate in the murder of Swedish artist Lars Vilks, and James Wenneker von Brunn, the elderly white supremacist who shot up the Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2009.