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August 21, 2006

Mutiny and the Bounty: Traveling Public & Common Sense

Authorities afraid to do what's neccesary and morally right because it's not their risk.

 

 

Yesterday, as some have no doubt read, passengers walked off a Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 bound for Manchester before takeoff because of concerns about two suspicious passengers among them. The two were described as unkempt and dodgy, wearing heavy leather jackets (not normal summertime fashion) and speaking in what appeared to passengers to be Arabic.

 

Naturally, to many of us the reaction of those passengers seems to be a rational one, given the current wartime climate and the patchy security in most airports. What is surprising however (even for the British press) is the manner in which the incident was reported. The headline in the Daily Mail called it a “mutiny”, implied that the captain had acted irresponsibly by refusing to fly, and that his passengers to the man, woman, and child, were like sheep merely caught up in a flock mentality and unable to deduce the cost-benefit of any risk involving flying with suspicious characters in an airline security reality which much more closely resembles Swiss cheese than anything remotely bulletproof. The paper makes no mention of the fact passengers may have also been thinking about the flight a few days ago diverted to Boston because of an unruly passenger who managed to smuggle potentially harmful items onboard. Nor did it seem too prepared to speak much of what you and I see so often when we go through airport security: lazy-eyed minimum wage employees whisking you and the fellow with the tattoos through while they have someone’s 95 year old Roman Catholic grandmother go through an exhaustive physical behind the curtain just a few feet away. A Tory security spokesman becomes the paper’s protagonist when the politico completely ignores all of this and essentially calls everyone who refused to fly with the two onboard racist:

 

"For those unfortunate two men to be victimised because of the colour of their skin is just nonsense."

 

It is indeed nonsense, but it's not because of the color of their skin, obviously. The nonsense rather is better attributed to those who made demands of ordinary people to which they themselves are not willing to acquiesce. As for why these passengers – many of whom must come from respected backgrounds – refused to fly with the pair: More accurately, it is because of the content of the character of each of the two as could best be determined by their personal habits, demeanor, and unseasonable attire. Or are we to suppose that 150 passengers plus crew all rose up in a racist cabal against two poor, waif-like defenseless-appearing men? If these two men wish not to be confused with terrorists, they should perhaps dress and learn to behave in a less menacing manner. While it is true that a terrorist could very easily clad himself in something closer to the social norm (as did many of the 9/11 hijackers), at the end of the day the lives of these other passengers are the ones on the line and they have but only their gut to go on, which again is why security officials need to use a more aggressive screening model for high-risk passengers that includes some forms of profiling. Until this happens, for many understandably, it is simply not worth risking one's life for a flight and a vague "higher ideal" set forth by elites who fly in private planes – the ideal that the masses should somehow, just as the terrorists, accept the call of martyrdom as a victory.

 

Yet passenger security is not left partially to chance in every corner of the globe. Israel, which has not had an airline hijacked in about 30 years employs liberal amounts of profiling techniques in conjunction with the most cutting edge technology, a sharp eye, and bomb-sniffing dogs. The combination has proven to be a cocktail that not only creates fewer headaches for the state of Israel, but assures all passengers – even the ones selected for extensive searches – that barring an aviation accident they will be arriving at their destination once their plane departs. Some might accuse Israel of being insensitive, but in reality, Israel has struck the perfect balance between invasion and respect for privacy and efficiency. Understanding that a complete passenger search would take approximately 45 minutes per passenger screened, Israeli airport security understands it must be highly selective (and right) about each person it selects for additional screening. While this may put some people out, it’s said that living people have far more rights and freedoms than do dead people. Further, it’s what the vast majority who must fly public transit (including even those set aside for extra scrutiny) want.

 

The notion that in Europe and the US ordinary citizens should be ready to offer their all – even their very lives – to score that symbolic “victory” when the government refuses to give its all in protecting them is nothing short of utter and very real nonsense. It hardly begs one to wonder whether the "masses" should accept the lax security created by a policy wonk-friendly PC environment that then makes them nothing less than the new front line in a children's crusade against not radical Islam but “hurt feelings”. Thus one need not wonder at all, as in the case of these passengers who walked off, why the “masses” should stand up, walk out, and say “we’ve had enough”. Most, the elites will no doubt be shocked to find, happen to favor the much more reasonable, safe, and democratic solution. Those who voted with their feet yesterday showed not only the terrorists, but the effete politicians and detached academics who really has the power – and that is precisely what makes us (the West) different than them (the Islamofascists).

 

 

Posted by Martin at August 21, 2006 01:09 AM

Comments

Posted by: Angel at August 21, 2006 08:14 AM