SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 22: Mark Flanagan, a congressional candidate in Florida, has become the fourth office-seeker of the Republican Party to call for profiling of Muslim airline passengers since the alleged airline bombing plot in Britain announced earlier this month.

“It is a fact that over the past 34 years, starting with the Munich Olympics, the majority of terrorist attacks have been carried out by Muslims,” said Mark Flanagan, a candidate in the 13th District of Florida, in a statement on Monday.

Flanagan’s political consultant, David Johnson, explained that under the proposal, passengers who appear to be Arab or Muslim would be pulled out of security lines for additional screening.

Although Flanagan claimed that he was the only congressional candidate calling for profiling of Muslim passengers, there were at least three other Republican politicians who called for profiling of Muslims last week.

Declaring that airport screeners shouldn’t be hampered by ‘political correctness’, house Homeland Security chairman Peter King also endorsed last week requiring people of ‘Middle Eastern and South Asian’ descent to undergo additional security checks because of their ethnicity and religion.

Discussing the recent revelation of an alleged plot in Britain to blow up US-bound airliners, the Seaford Republican said, “If the threat is coming from a particular group, I can understand why it would make sense to single them out for further questioning.”

His prejudice against the American Muslims is nothing new. In 2004 he said that 85 per cent of the mosques in the United States had extremist leadership.

Joining the fray, Paul Nelson, a Republican running in the third district of Wisconsin, also endorsed the idea last week on a local radio show.

The GOP gubernatorial candidate in New York, John Faso, also joined the chorus.

Faso said law-enforcement officials should be able to question a Muslim man without fear of being slapped by an ACLU lawsuit.

The GOP politicians’ endorsement of profiling came as Muslims and Arabs witnessed a rise in ethnic profiling, harassment and discrimination.

On three occasions in a nine-day stretch from August 8 to August 17, a total of five Arab-American men and a Pakistani woman were tagged as potential terrorists.

Two Dearborn men were arrested on August 8 in southeastern Ohio after being caught with a dozen prepaid cell phones and $11,000.

On August 11, three Texas men were arrested near a Wal-Mart outlet in Caro, Michigan, after buying 80 cell phones. Police said the men also had videos and photos of the Mackinac Bridge and 1,000 more cell phones in their van.