Tell Me Exactly…What Does a Terrorist Look Like?

“Fear of racial offense putting flyers in peril as companies are punished with ‘sensitivity training,’ while pilots act out of fear of Muslim litigation.”

Anti-discrimination lawsuits are running amok while airlines are trying to find a way to determine which passengers may safely board airliners as “government officials continue to compromise national security in order to avoid accusations of “racial profiling”—and in order to publicly acknowledge that the 9/11 Commission finally said: that the “enemy is not just ‘terrorism,’ [but] Islamist terrorism.”

Why is the government choosing litigation over the safety of airline passengers? Heather MacDonald Tells us why in City Journal

In 1997, government attorneys worried that a proposed anti-terrorism system for airlines might work too well. Although an early prototype of the Computer Assisted Passenger Screening System (CAPPS I) assiduously avoided collecting information about a passenger’s national origin, religion, race, or sex in assessing the risk that he might be terrorist, civil rights lawyers in the Justice and Transportation Departments fretted that the system might still be “discriminatory.” It still might pull aside “too many people of Arab descent by looking at, say frequent travel to the Middle East, among other risk factors.

MacDonald continues with the assertion that “Public-policy obsession with avoiding any possible charge of racism was the luxury of an age that believed that the United States faced no greater danger than the bigotry of its own people.”

I was astounded and speechless when I first read this statement. Racial bigots are more dangerous to America than terrorists? If the lives of hundreds of weren’t in the balance each time a plane takes off I might quibble with this assertion for bigotry is a characteristic that I normally find offensive. I draw the line at bigotry against terrorists. Forgive me; if this makes me a bigot, well I am!

In fact I am bigoted against other things as well. Let me list some of them. I am a bigot because I am prejudiced against those that fill and knowingly send shipping containers of dangerous materials to the U.S. in order to harm or kill me and kill members of my family. I am a prejudiced bigot against those government officials in other countries that harbor terrorists. My bigotry shows when I condemn others that give aid and comfort to the enemy. My prejudice and bigotry also extends to those that condemn me for being so stupid as to condemn me for having these bigoted feelings and for condemning the airline industry for attempting to keeping me safe should I ever again get on a plane.

Today my fear of flying has nothing to do with airline maintenance safety, nor weather conditions. In fact, I used to love to fly. Today I am more afraid of the inane policies of my own government that put “racial, ethnic, and religious” profiling ahead of what any sane person understands: sensitivity and fuzzy, warm feelings aren’t going to keep terrorists with bombs and other dangerous materials off of planes. Only unrelenting scrutiny and tough enforcement will do that.

Should I decide to get on a plane again, you bet I’ll be first in line to be thoroughly scrutinized, down to my skivvies if necessary. I’ll open my baggage for inspection and I’ll answer pertinent questions. Those passengers that are not willing to do so are putting the rest of us at risk. If you are too sensitive to go through this process or your religion forbids such scrutiny, I say to you: “Get off of the plane and find another mode of transportation."

I don’t care about sitting next to a person of another race or ethnic group, or even a person of another religion. I care my survival and of that of my family, and of course, the hundred or so other passengers that are along for the ride.

It appears that my government is full of useful idiots, useful to the terrorists. This shows what an expensive law school education can buy. Apparently they don’t have courses in common sense as only idiot would care more about regulations than airline safety.