Posted on 08/22/2006 3:26:00 AM PDT by goldstategop
Confiscating hair gel and Starbucks coffee is this year’s equivalent of the banning of nail clippers and lighters.
Put another way, the enhanced security measures put into place at airports across the world following this month’s disruption of a plot by British Muslims to smuggle liquid explosives onto several transatlantic flights aren’t making airline passengers feel much safer. Which is why Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has tried to reassure American travelers about boarding an airplane by reminding them of such protections as the “prohibition on liquids, gels and beverages in carry-on baggage.”
The problem is that while possible liquid explosives are mentioned by name, potential terrorists — almost always young Muslim men and increasingly women — are not. It should come as no surprise that passengers feel the need to profile people of “a certain ethnic or religious background” — as a proposed and overdue British security system would allow — on their own.
That was the case earlier this month when a passenger on a United Airlines flight saw a Winnipeg doctor, Ahmed Farooq, reciting an evening prayer. After the concerned passenger notified flight personnel, Farooq and two colleagues were taken off the plane. Farooq’s response could have been mistaken for an ACLU press release. Just as the ACLU considers racial profiling to be “institutional racism and discrimination,” Farooq described his removal from the plane as “institutionalized discrimination." The Muslim doctor didn’t understand why another passenger might feel uncomfortable hearing a Muslim prayer while sitting on a plane. Commercial jets crashing into the World Trade Center or blowing up over the Atlantic seem not to concern Farooq as much as his own inconvenience. Hence he complained that, “It makes you uneasy, because you realize you have to essentially watch every single thing you say and do, and it's worse for people who are of color, who are identifiable as a minority.”
But an important fact escapes Farooq: In the midst of a war against Islamic fascists, you do have to watch what you say and do. As Robert Spencer explains:
My work involves the Qur'an and other Islamic texts, but I no longer do work while flying that would mean having out in plain view books that would make other passengers concerned. Flying is a serious business nowadays. But this "people of colour" remark is just a cheap attempt to make this out to be a racial problem. It isn't. Farooq was "reciting prayers" -- when he could have done it silently. I have been in the presence of Muslims who have done so, so please don't tell me that that is impossible. These are the same prayers that jihad terrorists have prayed, so a passenger was concerned. I am sorry he was inconvenienced, but we all have been in so many ways since 9/11, haven't we? He should seek an apology from Osama bin Laden for indirectly occasioning his being taken off this flight.”
Dr. Farooq wasn’t the only Muslim taken off a flight this month. British travelers refused to allow their flight to take off until two suspicious Muslim men were removed from their plane. Fear, not racism, was what motivated several passengers to walk off the Monarch Airlines flight from Malaga, Spain. The Daily Mail reported that “despite the heat, the pair were wearing leather jackets and thick jumpers and were regularly checking their watches.” It was the pilot of the plane who made the decision not to take off until the men were escorted off the plane. According to Monarch, “The captain was concerned about the security surrounding the two gentlemen on the aircraft and the decision was taken to remove them from the flight for further security checks.”
This approach -- "better safe than sorry" -- has long been favored by El Al Airlines. Because the Israeli airline focuses more effort on looking for terror suspects than weapons, there has not been a successful hijacking of an El Al flight since 1968. This success comes in spite of the fact that the Israeli airline is a prime target of Islamic terrorists. In fact, bookings with El Al increased dramatically after September 11 because passengers know the airline is serious about security. El Al uses ethnic profiling to group passengers by risk level. Since people with Arabic names are high-risk travelers, they are taken to a room for a detailed interrogation and body and luggage checks.
As a result, nail clippers might make it on board, but terrorists will not. In 1996, an attack on an El Al plane was thwarted when a ticket agent trained to screen passengers questioned a woman about to board a flight. A reexamination of her luggage led to the discovery of seven pounds of explosives that her Jordanian boyfriend had placed inside. As this incident suggests, profiling is more efficient than metal detectors and bomb sniffing dogs.
For now, however, it appears that old black women will be considered as suspicious as Muslim men at American airports. The fact is that those whose job it is to protect American citizens are often more concerned with not offending sensitive Muslims. For instance, Michael Chertoff might have more success comforting worried passengers if the Department of Homeland Security didn’t give Muslim officials from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) behind-the-scenes tours of Customs screening operations at O'Hare International Airport because of CAIR complaints that Muslim travelers were being unfairly delayed as they entered the U.S. from abroad. The fact that past leaders of CAIR have been convicted for having ties to terrorism didn’t prevent its members from seeing point-of-entry, customs stations, secondary screening and interview rooms at the busiest airport in the United States.
Surrendering to the dogmas of "multiculturalism" makes the likelihood of another 9/11-style attack that much greater. In the meantime, airline passengers may have to be the last line of defense. Aspiring shoe bomber Richard Reid was prevented from blowing up an Air France flight only because of the alert passengers who subdued him.
For those who think passengers concerned about Muslims acting suspiciously are always racist, the story of actor James Woods is worth remembering. Woods was a passenger on a flight which was a trial run for the 9/11 attacks. He described what transpired on the plane in a 2002 interview:
I was on a flight, without going into the details of what made me suspicious of these four men, although it would have been blatantly obvious to the most casual observer, I took it upon myself to go to the flight attendant and ask to speak to the pilot of the plane. The first officer came out. I reported to him that I felt that the four men, and I said, "Can you look over my shoulder and see who I'm talking about?" And he said, "Yeah." I said I think they're going to hijack this plane. I mean, everything they're doing, and I explained to him these details, which I've been asked to keep private, until whatever jurisdiction, you know -- whatever trials may take place, their behavior was such that I felt that they were going to hijack the plane.
Ways exist to prevent such terrifying scenes. If only the government would cease pandering to hyper-sensitive Muslims and their enablers long enough to use them.
( No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)
Of course the ACLU supports profiling for admission to universities, for minority set asides in government contracts.
If a woman was raped in a bar, would the police suspect and question everyone present or nearby, women included, just to be fair?
Our nation has gone mad.
We have not really begun fighting this menace. It is a shame, you would think that after five years and countless Muslim attacks around the world, it would have given us enough time and impetus to develop a new mindset to handle the enemy. Instead we are still stuck in our PC mindset which totally handcuffs common sense and our ability to be proactive rather than reactive.
TSA, nail files, smoke, mirrors, dogs, and ponies, qualify as airport security, but certainly don't qualify for security in the air. I chose, post 9-11 to make my observations, a semi-permanent no fly option on commercial airliners. I would dearly love to see security Israeli style implemented immediately.
Since our idiotic government officials won't profile to protect me, I tend to do it myself. If there is more than one identifiable moslim male in the waiting area, I don't get on and I have been hassled by the airline and "security" folks......but I don't really give a damn and have told them so.
You take your protest right to the front lines! Have you resorted to the Me or them yet? IOW I'm not getting on but if you kick them off the flight I will get on? I figure about 100,000 of those incidents in two or three days and the word will get out that ground transportation is still available for now, to those of the persuasion of which we speak.
Difficult travel and a whole host of other inconviences needs to be the Islamic lot, at least in this country, until they recant or become as radical against the radical elements of their supposedly hijacked religion, as the radical elements are of ridding the world of proponents, friends, citizens, and allies, of the Great Satan.
This really annoys the heck out of me. If anyone in security thought for one second that the gels and liquids that they are making passengers throw away are explosives, do you think they would let them be just dumped in a trash can right next to where they are standing? How stupid is this? I am going to Disney next month and I want to bring a bottle of water with a sport top on the plane and into the secure area. I don't want to throw my bottled water away before I go through security, and then buy another one to throw away before I get on the plane. How wasteful is this? What about moisturizer? I want that, too. I have 2 children who will spill the open water cup that the airlines give out as soon as they get it. This will destroy the airline industry, because I will never fly again if I can't bring water and moisturizer and lip balm on board. I bought these tickets before this latest threat, so am stuck for now, but after this I will drive to Orlando.
As long as the TSA serves as a conduit for preferential minority hiring, security will be a sham.
I actually went through a screening where the individual that was supposed to be watching the x-ray images, was asleep.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.