Al-Qaida wins again

By Samuel Blumenfeld

On Christmas Day, 2009, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab gave Osama bin Laden a great holiday gift. And he didn’t even have to blow up the plane to do it. All he had to do was be caught with bomb materials in his underwear to force Barack Obama and Janet Napolitano to recommend new draconian and expensive body-search methods in international airports around the world.

Already the Dutch authorities have announced that Schipol Airport will begin using full-body scanners on passengers flying to the U.S. The decision was made after discussions with Janet Napolitano. But passengers objecting to a body scan can be patted down.

Philip Baum, editor of Aviation Security International, said scanners will still not catch material carried internally, a common smuggling method for drug traffickers. 

”Once again, we’re looking for a quick-fix piece of technology when we ought be using the best piece of technology there is – the human brain,” he said. “We ought to be profiling people.”

Of course, al-Qaida will begin devising explosives that can be inserted in a terrorist’s rectum. Will that require perfectly normal passengers to undergo rectum searches in the future?  The jihadists are quite clever. They are capable of devising all sorts of ways of killing the infidels. Their triumphant 9/11 attack required recruiting 20 terrorists to take flying lessons, hijack four airliners and crash them into predetermined targets – all undetected by the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, the government’s ultimate goal is to make body scanning one of the routine ways of screening passengers. And so, anybody embarking on an international flight will be subjected to a body scan before being able to board a plane.

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All of that airport rigmarole is supposed to make us feel that the government is going to great lengths to protect us from al-Qaida’s suicide bombers. For example, once it became known that a suicide bomber could actually get on a plane with a bomb in his shoe, every air traveler would henceforth be forced to remove his or her shoes for inspection, including Gucci loafers.

By the way, did you see a picture of the shoe bomber? If anyone ever looked like an al-Qaida terrorist, he was it. A little ethnic profiling would have saved millions of people from having to take their shoes off at airports.

And now that we know that an al-Qaida suicide bomber can get on a plane with a bomb in his underwear, our government has decided that every traveling grandmother, fashion model, bored housewife, or female politician is capable of carrying a bomb in her panties and must therefore be body-scanned or patted down.

That’s multiculturalism gone mad. In other words, according to that politically correct doctrine, everyone is capable of carrying bomb materials in his shoes and underwear – with no exceptions! And most Americans, when asked about body scanning, seemed to agree that that’s the only way to stop suicide bombers from getting onto planes.

Under multiculturalism, it is assumed that Osama bin Laden is capable or recruiting American grandmothers and suburban housewives to become suicide bombers without even undergoing training in Yemen. Of course, that is crazy, but so is multiculturalism. What goes on in American airports these days is unadulterated insanity at the cost of billions of dollars and massive inconvenience to everyone.

And yet, there is a very easy way to spot a potential suicide bomber. Simply have a sane psychologist look over the passengers about to board an aircraft and ask this one simple question: Who among them wants to have sex with 72 virgins in Islamic paradise?

That would eliminate 99.9 percent of the passengers. And the few who might be suspect could easily be given the full-body scan, shoe inspection and interrogation, without subjecting everyone else to the humiliating searches now commonplace at the airports.  But of course, that would be ethnic profiling, which is a great social sin in America.

Because of Umar’s great performance on Christmas Day, the airlines have hastily decided that all passengers during the last hour of flight will be restricted in using the lavatory and covering their laps under the assumption that everyone on that international flight is a potential terrorist. The lone young Muslim sitting in row 22 who bought his one-way ticket with $3,000 cash, had no passport and no luggage except a small carry-on will be treated by the flight attendants as just another passenger, requiring no special surveillance. That will make everyone feel safe.

As a matter of fact, Erik Ackerboom, head of the Dutch counterterrorism bureau, dismissed suggestions that Abdulmutallab should have aroused suspicion when he paid cash for a one-way ticket from Lagos to Detroit and had no check-in luggage. Paying cash in Africa is not unusual, he said, and the lack of a checked suitcase “wasn’t a reason for alarm.”

And this man is in charge of Dutch counterterrorism? What planet is he living on?  If he wasn’t alarmed, how about being just a little suspicious?  And what about the fact that Umar’s wealthy father warned the American embassy of his son’s dangerous state of mind? Umar had also acquired an American visa from our State Department, which the authorities in Yemen took as a sign of American approval of this young man’s character. So they let him in, and he found his way to the al-Qaida training camp.

What happened on Christmas Day in Detroit simply proved once again that the government’s system of airport security is a joke. And everyone knows that no such system can possibly be fail-safe. All that the system has done is make it a little more difficult for al-Qaida operatives to get on planes.

Although there are thousands of international flights every day, virtually all of them are perfectly safe, not because of airport security, but because al-Qaida simply doesn’t have enough suicide bombers to go around. All they need is one bomb on one plane to force the entire civilized world to recognize their power.

And so, instead of using our brains to attack the problem, we are forced by the apostles of multiculturalism to engage in the most ridiculous way to provide flight security for the general public. Sheer providence is what saved the lives of the passengers on that Christmas flight. Thank God, the bomb didn’t go off.

This lonely young Nigerian, who got on the plane with no luggage and no passport, was obviously looking forward to the 72 virgins breathlessly awaiting him in Allah’s heaven. Instead, he now faces a long term in an American prison with three meals a day, recreational activities, satellite TV and more than enough time to memorize the Quran.

Samuel Blumenfeld

Dr. Samuel L. Blumenfeld is the author of eight books on education, including: "Is Public Education Necessary?" "NEA: Trojan Horse in American Education," "The Whole Language/OBE Fraud" and "Homeschooling: A Parents Guide to Teaching Children." His latest is "Crimes of the Educators: How Utopians Are Using Government Schools to Destroy America's Children." Back issues of his incisive newsletter, The Blumenfeld Education Letter, are available online. Read more of Samuel Blumenfeld's articles here.