Flying While Still Remembering 9/11

The story of the 6 imams pulled off the Minneapolis flight last week was successfully mythologized as “flying while Muslim” almost immediately. It makes it so much less nerve-wracking to fly when you know that terrorists exist only in the fevered imaginations of Islamophobes—or perhaps in the UK, where they're actually catching these guys and then charging them.

Fortunately, the more information comes out about what really happened in Minneapolis, the clearer the picture gets.

Did you know, for example, that the mere fact that these guys were saying their prayers before boarding had nothing to do with why passengers and crew became alarmed? As explained by Audrey Hudson in the Washington Times, there was much more to it than that:

“Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin.

“’That would alarm me,’ said a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous. ‘They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane.’

“A pilot from another airline said: ‘That behavior has been identified as a terrorist probe in the airline industry.’”

Now don't you find that interesting? First, one simply has to wonder what these gentlemen were up to. And then, don’t you just want to know more about what these “terrorist probes” in the airline industry are?

While the imams, CAIR, and Reps. Sheila Jackson-Lee and John Conyers are trying to make it illegal to look too closely at a Muslims, I’m glad to see that some law enforcement authorities are swimming against the mind-control tide for the sake of security:

“Federal air marshals and others yesterday urged passengers to remain vigilant to threats.

“’The crew and passengers act as our additional eyes and ears on every flight,' said a federal air marshal in Las Vegas, who asked that his name not be used. "If [crew and passengers] are afraid of reporting suspicious individuals out of fear of being labeled a racist or bigot, then terrorists will certainly use those fears to their advantage in future aviation attacks.’”

Read the rest of “Marshals decry imam’s charges” in the Washington Times.

Fear of being called, or fear of feeling you deserve to be called, a racist or a bigot can make it pretty hard to see things clearly. The path of least resistance makes it so much easier to simply go along with the hand-wringers blathering that what happened in Minneapolis was some kind of “flying while Muslim” case of abuse. Never mind what it cost the airline to sit on the tarmac for an extra hour while these clowns are being investigated, burning fuel and getting behind schedule. Never mind how many thousands of Muslims fly on US airlines every single day without being bothered at all. Never mind that everybody—and I mean everybody—who makes homeland security decisions these days expects regular supervisory visits from CAIR and the ADA, and that when a Muslim is occasionally detained, it becomes an instant national story and a guaranteed ten minutes of free air time for Muslim spokespersons to browbeat dhimmi interviewers on the cable news channels.

To cut through all that misplaced righteousness Townhall columnist Ben Shapiro breaks it down in a way almost anyone can understand: “Would you let your child take this flight?"

It's too bad the point has to be personalized that way to get it across. But it does appear that, even if we figure it isn't worth it to make a sane remark at a holiday gathering, at least when we're getting ready to trust our lives or those of our loved ones to commercial air travel, self-preservation wins out over political correctness. Which means that terrorists can't count on US passengers any more to sit back, relax, and enjoy being turned into missiles for the jihad.

Which means guys who hate us have to work that much harder to get their hands on our planes. Which means they have to probe the line where tolerance ends and aroused wariness takes over. So far, passengers faced with genuinely suspicious behavior (and that doesn't mean just praying), have chosen wariness over tolerance. It is remarkable how well Minneapolis authorities, especially the flight crews who have to fly all the time, have refused to cave in on this one.

These 6 guys were up to something, and no mistake. I don't believe these 6 "holy men" intended to hijack or blow up that plane. They were merely scouting the way for the guys who are intending to hijack or blow up a plane. Which makes them no better than Mohammed Atta to me.

They aren't going to stop trying. Based on this incident I'm sure meetings will be had to explain that barking out the name of Allah at a baording gate and making defiant political comments before taking up carefully choreographed guard positions throughout the cabin is definitely going to trigger suspicion from a planeload of travel-weary Kafirs. As long as passengers keep flagging down flight attendants and sending notes up to the cockpit, the bad guys aren't going to get things quite the way they need them to be to carry out their plans.

Which is why it would be a really big help to our enemies if some useful idiots in Congress could pass some laws requiring prior restraint on anyone in authority daring to even think of noticing anything suspicious about guys as bodaciously suspicious as the 6 imams. Maybe John Conyers can introduce a bill outlawing the instinct of self-preservation.