RUTHIE BLUM: FLYING LOW
Flying low
According to a scoop in Britain’s Sunday Express, an Islamist plot to carry out a multi-pronged terrorist attack right before Christmas was uncovered two weeks ago by American intelligence officers. The 9/11-style death extravaganza was — or still is — going to involve blowing up five passenger planes bound for London and other key European destinations.
In response to the imminent threat, British authorities have begun engaging in meetings. They are trying to figure out what to do in the event of a terrorist attack on the U.K. — something that Whitehall officials have been calling “almost inevitable.” You know, what with radical Muslims funding and running the mosques in Britain. And all those home-grown jihadists traveling to and from Iraq and Syria, where they are receiving training from Islamic State terrorists on how to destroy the West from within. Oh, and on the best beheading techniques, to boot.
To confront these challenges, politicians and airport-security personnel in the U.K. are discussing methods for preventing the mass murder of passengers who have booked flights for the upcoming holidays. And though the powers-that-be all agree that it would be a disaster if thousands of innocent people were slaughtered as a result of airborne suicide bombings, there is a controversy surrounding the best way to keep the killers and their explosives off the planes.
One problem they have encountered is that even ethnic profiling (a policy abhorrent to politically correct idiots, who consider viewing Arabs at airports with suspicion to be racism) is inefficient. This is because many Western women, enamored with machete-wielding Muslim men, have joined the ranks of terrorist organizations.
As former Home Office risk adviser Sally Leivesley told the Sunday Express, “Crime profiling shows that white, middle-class women, who are better than averagely educated, are susceptible to the terrorist narrative. They see themselves at the forefront of attempts to change the world, and represent a very dangerous tool for the terrorists.”
In order to act responsibly, then, Heathrow security would have to strip-search every blue-eyed blonde for concealed weapons. If such a gargantuan endeavor were actually to be undertaken, there would not be enough hours in a day, let alone a sufficient number of airport personnel, to accomplish it.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=10779
Another issue of great concern is the recent development of non-metallic bombs undetectable by airport scanners. That these can be hidden inside cell phones, computers and other electronic devices makes them especially dangerous and easy to smuggle onto planes.
The only solution that emerged from “high-level governmental negotiations” on this subject was to impose a ban on all hand luggage. Setting aside the fact that this does not address the question of non-detectable explosives placed in checked baggage, it was deemed unrealistic. And rightly so.
It has been inconvenient and pointless enough as it is for air travelers to hand over their water bottles and nail files while removing shoes and belts, before going through metal detectors prior to boarding. But not being allowed to get on a plane with any bag whatsoever will not fly, so to speak.
Awareness about the virtual impossibility of forcing passengers to part with their phones and laptops is causing what one security source referred to as “paralysis.”
But British authorities still do not seem to grasp that it is precisely this kind of paralysis that has enabled terrorists to be fruitful and multiply in the first place. Nor do they realize that in a country whose police force is basically unarmed, those in possession of knives, guns and bombs are de facto kings.
It boggles the mind to consider that even though the bloodbath planned for Christmas was discovered by the United States and subsequently revealed to Europe, it has not been thwarted. In other words, rather than giving thought to a ban on hand luggage, British authorities ought to be canceling all flights — or at least admitting they have no way of protecting anyone boarding a plane in the near future. Indeed, their new motto should be: “Fly and die at your own risk.”
The jihadists must be very pleased. Without detonating a single switch, they have managed to spread their reign of terror across European skies. Nor do they need to abort their original plot, which they can see is being met with helplessness of the stiff-upper-lip variety.
This is but one among many shocking examples of Western defeatism in the face of Islamist aggression. How many dismembered bodies will it take for Europeans to stop bashing Israel — a lone combatant on the front lines of this global war — and start wresting their civilization from the clutches of barbarians bent on its destruction?
At this point, one shudders to contemplate the answer.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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