The West is just figuring out what Israel has long known, it seems. And I’m not sure why it has taken such a long time for them to catch on as there have been plenty of previous examples to make people sit up and take note. I’m talking, of course, about the use of blonde, blue-eyed folks and others who bear no resemblance to Middle-Eastern Muslims to engage in acts of terror. But Jihad Jane, pictured above, is finally making people sit up and take notice.

Israel has had long experience with unlikely suspects engaging or attempting to engage in, or being duped unawares into engaging in, acts of terror. There were the radical Japanese tourists back in the 70s who worked with the PLO and came into Israel and murdered a whole lot of people at the Lod airport. There was the 8-month pregnant Irish girl who was packed off with a bomb in her luggage on her way to what she thought was to be her wedding in Israel –her Muslim boyfriend had other ideas for her, as he was working for the Syrian government to plan terror attacks and thought she and his unborn child would blow up real good, along with the other airline passengers. There was the blonde British terrorist who took part in the suicide bombing of Mike’s Place in Tel Aviv. There was the blond and freckled redneck family the U.S. only arrested for terror activity last year but who had been identified –and turned away at Ben-Gurion airport — as terrorists by Israel more than 2 years before. The list goes on. But it goes on outside of Israel, as well. Richard Reid, the Dutch woman who blew herself and others up in Iraq, and so forth.

This is why Israel uses a tiered threat identification structure. Muslims are the most frequent terrorists and, in this part of the world, Arab Muslims in particular. So if you are an Arab and a non-citizen you will come in for the absolute fourth or maybe fifth degree when you arrive in this country. If you are a citizen with links to extremists or potential extremists, even extremely peripherally, whether you are Arab or otherwise, you will also be under intense scrutiny. Then come the people who are neither Arab nor Muslim but who have links, previously identified or discovered with questioning at the airport, to any people and parts of the Middle East outside of Israel. Extra extra scrutiny. Then come the “average” tourists — regardless of looks, religious affiliation, or country of origin, you will get an extra look-over and if anything that you say or do makes what in most countries would be considered the most paranoid of the paranoid to get a teensy itch, you are going to get a lot more questioning and scrutiny yet.

But it is targeted, you know. There is none of this “treat everyone alike” and simple “random” searches –you will end up with a lot of dead people that way, eventually. You focus the greatest amount of scrutiny on the group that has proved to be the greatest threat –you profile –but you don’t just ignore everyone else because they aren’t in the ‘most likely of the likely’ group. You also don’t waste your energy giving the same amount of intense scrutiny to the far greater number of people in the “yeah there’s a potential somewhere in there but far less likely” group. You scrutinize in proportion to the risk and if that proportion ends up changing, your scrutiny activity ends up changing with it. When 50% of the terrorists are blond and blue-eyed Jihad Janes, you scrutinize everyone to the 9th degree.