It’s (still) the jihad, stupid…
Mark Steyn points out the obvious:
I wrote a few days after 9/11 that the modern airplane cabin was the most advanced model of the progressive social-democratic state, the sky-high version of trends that, on the ground, progress more slowly. It was a statist’s dream on Sept. 11: no smoking, 100 per cent gun control, and no First Amendment either. The justification was a familiar one — that in return for surrendering liberty, the state will ensure you are safe. And so on 9/11 three out of the four planes followed all the 1970s security procedures and everybody died. Because in the end the state wasn’t up there with them.
It was the same on Christmas Day. This time it was the post-9/11 security procedures that didn’t work, and once again the state wasn’t up there. We’re told that Mr. Abdulmutallab wasn’t on the no-fly list per se — there’s only about 4,000 people on that — but on a kind of standby list for the no-fly list, with about half-a-million people on it. Whatever. Had he chosen to light up his panties in the bathroom instead of waiting till he got back to his seat, everyone would be dead.
Question: what do the 9/11 killers, the Shoebomber, the Heathrow plotters, the Pantybomber, the London Tube bombers, the doctors who drove a flaming SUV through the concourse of Glasgow Airport and the would-be killers of Danish cartoonists all have in common? Answer: they’re Muslim. Sometimes they’re Muslims with box cutters, sometimes they’re Muslims with flaming shoes, sometimes they’re Muslims with liquids and gels, sometimes they’re Muslims with fully loaded underwear. But the Muslim bit is a constant. What we used to call a fact. But America’s leaders cannot state that simple fact, and so the TSA is obliged to pretend that all seven billion inhabitants of this planet represent an equal threat.
As a commenter to the article points out, the Israelis have a very effective system in place — which, yes, involves profiling — and can typically identify someone as being Islamic with a handful of quick questions and some elementary observation. It doesn’t matter whether said someone is Arab, Caucasian, African…they find out.
And yeah, it’s not fair that people are being selected for additional screening purely on the basis of their Religion…but guess what? Life isn’t fair, and terrorism isn’t either. It’s not fair that a couple hundred people could have been blown out of an airplane over Detroit, and were spared from this fate only by the culprit’s bad sense of timing. And it wouldn’t have been fair if Abdulmutallab had been profiled at some point along his abortive journey to “martyrdom.”
The difference is, the second unfairness didn’t happen at all; the first very nearly did.
Yes, not all Muslims are terrorists, and yes, we can all think of examples of terror attacks that have been perpetrated by non-Muslims. But all Islamic terrorists are, in fact, Muslims, and most of us can probably think of a longer list of examples of Islamic terrorism than we can of non-Islamic terrorism. And by “longer,” I mean “a lot longer.”
(hat tip)
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