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This week the Blogosphere has discussed in detail the strange behavior of 14 Syrian passengers on the June 29, 2004 Northwest Airlines flight #327 from Detroit to Los Angeles. As summarized by Daniel Pipes:
To make a long story short, fourteen Syrian “musicians” acted strangely during the flight, coming and going to the toilet, signaling each other from various points on the plane, disobeying instructions, intimidating passengers.
From Jacobsen’s article:
Suddenly, seven of the men stood up—in unison—and walked to the front and back lavatories. One by one, they went into the two lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Right in front of us, two men stood up against the emergency exit door, waiting for the lavatory to become available. The men spoke in Arabic among themselves and to the man in the yellow shirt sitting nearby. One of the men took his camera into the lavatory. Another took his cell phone. Again, no one approached the men. Not one of the flight attendants asked them to sit down.
...I grabbed my son, I held my husband’s hand and, despite the fact that I am not a particularly religious person, I prayed. The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed the man in the yellow shirt he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word No.
Many have found anomalies in this account, with a few even questioning its veracity. From BlogCritics:
The “terrorists” in this story apparently are doing very little to hide their connection. They give each other knowing nods and thumbs up signs. Apparently a number of passengers noticed and were afraid. Wouldnt the “terrorists” still want to hide their connection?
...No sir. The whole thing smacks of urban legend. I’m going on record right now. I call BS. I guess we’ll see if I’m right. If I’m wrong and it’s all true, well, I’ll be wrong and the writer will have done the world a service by heightening our awareness. And I’ll apologize.
However, Michelle Malkin confirms many of the details reported by Jacobsen:
Regarding Annie Jacobsen’s intriguing article, I just got word from Dave Adams of the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAM). Adams confirmed that he spoke to Annie Jacobsen, was quoted accurately in her story, and confirmed some of the basic facts outlined in her article (there were 14 Syrians on the flight; they were questioned by the Los Angeles Police Department, FBI, FAM, and so on; they were a musical band).
Let’s say everybody quoted above is right, namely, Jacobsen reported accurately, and the Syrians were too blatant in their behavior to be what they seemed to be to Jacobsen, and to Dave Adams. What’s going on?
Here’s a possible explanation I haven’t yet seen elsewhere: the Syrians were musicians who were jerking our chains in order to scare us. They purposely and blatantly acted like terrorists in order to scare the plane’s passengers, knowing that as they were carrying no weapons they would not be punished. The result: terrorism without having to do anything that would get them killed, arrested or deported.
As Jacobsen notes:
So here’s my question: Since the FBI issued a warning to the airline industry to be wary of groups of five men on a plane who might be trying to build bombs in the bathroom, shouldn’t a group of 14 Middle Eastern men be screened before boarding a flight?
Apparently not. Due to our rules against discrimination, it can’t be done. During the 9/11 hearings last April, 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman stated that …it was the policy (before 9/11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that’s discriminatory.
So even if Northwest Airlines searched two of the men on board my Northwest flight, they couldn’t search the other 12 because they would have already filled a government-imposed quota.
Per Daniel Pipes:
...I looked at the public regulations for airline security procedures back in January 2002 and found them a recipe for disaster. Now we learn that the confidential regulations are yet worse. If we don’t get serious now about security, we will pay severely and then we’ll get serious, after who-knows-how-many are dead.
This has got to go. Air marshalls must be empowered to search anyone they want of any ethnicity, particularly anyone of Arabic descent, at any time during flight. Political correctness be damned. It’s better to have a safe flight and offended passengers than an unsafe flight and all dead pasengers. If passengers of Arabic descent don’t like it, let them ask their leaders to stand up and declare that they are against terrorists wherever they are to be found worldwide.
#1
#2That "jerking our chains" theory is one of the more sensible bits of rank conjecture I've heard.
I would rather not get mixed up in this whole distasteful brouhaha, but I would point out that you could search all the young men of "Arabic descent" you want (if you could devise a way to distinguish them from similar ethnic types) and still be missing the point:
First of all, not all Muslims are Arabs, and vice versa. Iranians, for example, speak Persian and go back to the Parthians of classical antiquity. Many Pakistanis speak Urdu (not to mention charmingly accented English); Afghans speak Pashto and Dari (related to Persian). There are plenty of blue-eyed Muslims (some of them Afghan or Kurd or Tuareg or Chechen), not to mention African-American Muslims who speak deep-fried American, not to mention all those club-crazy, decadent hipster Cockney Pakistanis rebelling against strict upbringings. There are yurt-dwelling Mongolian throat-singing Muslims, but they don't get to Miami much anymore. Are you going to stop all Francophones to check whether they a little pied-noir in their background? Will you kick the paranoia up a notch and start looking askance at redneck-looking guys who might belong to the white supremacist groups, which the Internet rumor mill says are making common cause with al-Qaeda? There is a certain ideological compatibility there, after all. So let's send everyone who looks like Terry Nichols to Guantanamo ... or back to England ...or at least force them to take Greyhound instead.
And if you believe that Islam itself is the problem, along with Rev. Graham, you then have to confront the 1001 flavors of Islam: Sunnis, Shiites, and Sufis, broken down into Twelvers and Seveners and Salafis and Wahhabis and Ismailis and the various madhahib of each subdivision and so on and so forth, all multiplied by nationality. Not to mention the Druze. What's up with that?
So which Muslims are the violent, fanatical Muslims, and will we require theological training for airport screeners to make such determinations? "Are you or have you ever been an advocate of the view that the Khariji were correct on the question of zakat? The Maliki school of jurisprudence: haram or not?"
It's probably more sensible just to narrow things down by nationality. We do have a list of states where terror groups operate, which we use to justify closer inspection of persons travelling to and from those countries.
For example, young, unemployed Saudi men with pilot training whose names are listed on terrorist watchlists (Is that Atta with an 'ain or an alef, sir?) and are wearing T-shirts that read "My brother went to a jihadist training camp in Afghanistan and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."
Let's see if the feds can get that one right before we graduate them to more advanced levels of cultural analysis.
Young Syrian musicians behaving oddly, possibly in order to bust our chops? By all means, let's give them the hairiest possible eyeball; have the federal marshals make them sit down, shut up, and watch the crappy in-flight movie. Hell, you could even assign 'em Soviet Intourist-style minders.
But if you want to obsess endlessly about the enemy within, you have a choice: either educate yourself about the world you live in or move to a compound in Idaho and start sticking to grain alchohol and rainwater. As Pogo might have said under the circumstances, "I have met the enemy and he looks just like us."
#3Colin,
Thanks for this great comment.
...you could search all the young men of "Arabic descent" you want (if you could devise a way to distinguish them from similar ethnic types) and still be missing the point:
Ah, but that's not the goal. The goal is not to search people of Arabic descent. The goal is to be able to conduct airline searches, precisely without restrictions on our ability to do so based on the nationality of the passengers.
Why isn't anyone asking the really important question:
WHAT ARE 14 SYRIANS DOING HERE AT ALL???
Is there some sort of musician shortage in this country and the world in general that makes it necessary to bring them in from a KNOWN terorist state?
We're told repeatedly by the Bush administration that this country is at war. By their standards we would have allowed the Berlin Philharmonic to play Broadway in 1942.
SYRIA IS A TERRORIST STATE!!! Doesn't the US government know this?
After 9-11 I heard everyone ask really important questions, like how did they get the weapons on the plane? How did they get so well organized? Who was in charge?
No one ever asked why were they here in the first place?