RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Thursday, according to the Miami Herald, a Muslim airplane mechanic named Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani was arrested “on a sabotage charge accusing him of disabling a navigation system on a flight with 150 people aboard before it was scheduled to take off from Miami International Airport earlier this summer.” But calm down, you ignorant and unrepentant Islamophobe: as always, this has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. How do we know that? Why, because Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani tells us so.

A criminal complaint affidavit filed in Miami federal court states that Abdul-Majeed Marouf Ahmed Alani told federal air marshals that “his intention was not to cause harm to the aircraft or its passengers.”

Well, that’s a relief. The poor lamb was just “upset” over the ongoing impasse between his mechanics’ union and American Airlines. This unresolved conflict has, he said, “affected him financially.”

Acting out on his frustration and rage, Alani, according to the Herald, tampered with “the so-called air data module,” which “caused an error alert as the pilots powered up the plane’s engines on the runway.” This led to the flight being “aborted and taken out of service for routine maintenance at America’s hangar at MIA, which is when the tampering with the ADM system was discovered during an inspection. An AA mechanic found a loosely connected tube in front of the nose gear underneath the cockpit that had been deliberately obstructed with some sort of hard foam material…. According to the complaint filed Thursday, Alani glued the foam inside the tube leading from outside the plane to its air data module, a system that reports aircraft speed, pitch and other critical flight data. As a result, if the plane had taken off that day from MIA, the pilots would have had to operate the aircraft manually because the ADM system would not have received any computer data.”

So the plane could have crashed, and hundreds of people could have been killed, but all Alani wanted to do, he insisted, was “cause a delay or have the flight canceled in anticipation of obtaining overtime work.”

Let he who hasn’t exposed hundreds of people to the risk of a terrifying, fiery death in order to obtain some overtime hours cast the first stone. According to the Associated Press, “Nothing in the criminal complaint against Alani suggests any link to terrorism, and prosecutors did not indicate that any such charges are pending.”

Of course. He told us why he did it, and that’s that. Only the most mean-spirited Islamophobe could possibly doubt him, or consider that a further investigation into his motives might be called for.

Nonetheless, there are several troubling anomalies in the story of this proud and innovative Union Man. One is that he has some experience with playing the victimhood card that is so beloved of Islamic supremacists in the United States: AP reported that “was born in Iraq and became a U.S. citizen in 1992, sued Alaska Airlines for discrimination based on national origin. A judge dismissed the lawsuit for lack of evidence.” Also, in court Alani “spoke to Magistrate Judge John O’Sullivan through an Arabic interpreter.” Yet “according to American, Alani is proficient in English.”

It is hard to escape the impression that Alani is trying to suggest that he is a poor beleaguered immigrant, struggling mightily to make a living in the cold, Islamophobic Amerikkka of Donald Trump. That doesn’t make him a jihad terrorist, of course, but it does reveal a great deal about the weakness and rot in American culture today: Alani appears to know that Muslims are among the Left’s pet victim groups, and that consequently, if he can convince the jury that he is a poor pawn caught between his union and American Airlines, while trying to make his non-English-speaking way in an English-speaking world, a world in which he faces daily “hate” as an Iraqi, he may get off easy for his attempted sabotage, however many deaths may have resulted from his actions.

And the worst part about it is that he may be right.