Margaret's target today is airport security. She starts unusually well by rightly pointing out screening measures -- like shoe inspections -- brought into effect as a result of the latest attempt to bring down an airliner are often largely ineffective. But things quickly decay as she despairs that her favored alternative -- religious profiling -- is unlikely to be embraced: "[if] everyone is equal, then differential treatment must be racist."
Margaret's guiding assumption is that the percentage of airline passengers who intend to crash/ blow up/ etc. the planes on which they fly is higher among young Muslim males than among the flying public writ large (and given that white Christian terrorists have recently seemed more interested in blowing up government buildings and killing doctors who perform abortions than blowing up planes, this may even be so). The lesson Margaret draws is that white Christian (and atheist?) passengers ought to subjected to minimal security screening and Muslim males ought to be subjected to presumably much more stringent measures than all of us currently are -- can you say "body cavity search" anyone? And even though the vast majority of Muslim male passengers have neither done nor intend anything that warrants this kind of treatment, some such practice is nevertheless justified as "a certain collective punishment of the killers' neighbours."
The trouble with racial/ religious profiling is that it, in effect, produces a system of differential rights for members of different racial or religious groups. Differential treatment is, of course, compatible with equal rights, but only when based on behavioural evidence: if my behaviour, but not yours, gives reasonable grounds to believe that I mean to engage in malfeasance -- or have already done so -- then the authorities may reasonably detain me, but not you. But differential treatment based not on what one has done, but on who one is -- as occurs with racial/ religious profiling -- is not compatible with equal rights: to be a member of a profiled group is simply to have a weaker right to non-interference.
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On a more practical level, imposing very intrusive searches on all Muslim males, or all Muslims, or all dark-skinned people, or on all people with beards, will also be extremely wasteful-- terrorists constitute a tiny minority of any easily identified group of passengers: It targets all members of a single group, the vast majority of whom are completely innocent, for very unpleasant treatment, while automatically privileging and protecting people like Margaret. (I think I smell a motive...) It also makes all too clear what terrorists must do to evade searches-- find supporters who are not dark skinned, bearded or identifiably Muslim. This may not be easy, but we keep hearing that it only takes 1! Better not to create such loopholes (and not to recruit more terrorists by systematically mistreating Muslims, which is already a recognized problem).
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