Let me keep this simple: Profiling does not work.

Attempting to combat terrorism on a skin-deep level underestimates the very threat of terrorism itself. It’s naïve and counterproductive.

After the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing attempted by a lone, insane Nigerian-born extremist, there have been calls from some for more racial profiling.

One such call came from radio host Mike Gallagher. He said there should be a special screening line for anyone with the name “Abdul or Ahmed or Mohammed.”

If you think that was absurd, New York Congressman Peter King said “100 percent of the Islamic terrorists are Muslim,” and that people should be profiled based on their religion.

I wonder what group he would fit into if he were profiled by his intellect. A complete idiot?

Broad-based ethnic profiling is a futile system for fighting terrorism for a host of reasons. The most important and obvious reason is that terrorists come in all nationalities, religions, names, colors and sexes.

The famous shoe bomber was British-Jamaican with a pleasant sounding Western name, Richard Reid, and lest I forget, he had a ponytail.

Then you have the Australian terrorist, David Hicks. He was trained by Al-Qaeda and served under the Afghanistan Taliban regime in 2001. He was charged and convicted for providing material support for terrorism in 2007.

And what about Timothy McVeigh, an Irish Catholic United States Army veteran who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma in 1995? How do you profile that?

It was the deadliest terrorism attack prior to 9/11, killing 168 people. He wasn’t Muslim.

The list would not be complete without John Walker Lindh. He was white, American and a Taliban fighter.

Profiling a specific group of people based on their nationality and ethnic background alienates the people that are crucial to capturing terrorists.

Proactive measures are the answer to combating terrorism, according to David Harris, a University of Toledo law professor, in a Newsweek article.

“By the time the threat is at the subway or airport, we’re down to the last line of defense,” Harris said. I totally agree.

And for proactive measures to work, authorities would have to prove to people that they can be trusted to gather helpful intelligence — instead of proclaiming groups of people guilty just because of the size of their garments or length of their beards.

Profiling only exasperates the porous relationship America has with the world. There are more than one billion Muslims in the world and millions of them are Americans. An overwhelming majority of them are far from being extremists.

Also, terrorism isn’t a stagnant idea, especially the kind we’re witnessing. The people, the measures, the bombs, the techniques and the plots are changing.

And to enhance profiling by adding a new race, nation and schema whenever terrorists strike would be to continue chasing terrorists without stopping them.

Rather than mindlessly playing out the script made for America by terrorists, the Obama administration should go a step further — a step beyond merely adapting methods without changing them.

Even homeland security experts like Stephen Flynn have noted that behavior — and not race — is usually the giveaway in a terrorist act.

The Christmas Day bombing attempt, like most other attacks, had lots of red flags.

A young man radicalized in Britain goes AWOL on his family and seeks refuge in Yemen. He’s reported to the CIA by his own father and the Nigerian police, pays in cash for a one-way ticket in Ghana, and boards a U.S.-bound plane without any luggage. What more could you ask for?

The thought that terrorism is skin-deep or ethnicity-based is a backward and ignorant ideology, one that threatens to continually blind officials to the real terrorist. Racial and religious profiling is crude, unethical and barbaric.

Food For Thought: There is more to life than meets the eye. Look deeper to see clearer, because the surface doesn’t always represent the depth.