It wasn’t a “failed” terrorist attack

The drama that took place over Detroit on Christmas Eve, after one Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was prevented from blowing up a Northwest Airlines plane inbound from Amsterdam has been dubbed a “failed” terrorist attack by the former mainstream media. But the truth is, that attempt to blow up the plane in midair was every bit as successful as if the bomb had detonated and blown the plane and all aboard to smithereens. V.I. Lenin said, “The purpose of Terrorism is to terrorize.” And terrorize the Yemeni contingent of al Qaeda did in this so-called “failed” effort.

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Over the years they have succeeded in forcing us to change the way we travel, adding countless hours of lost time and billions of dollars in unproductive additional costs to air travel. Hard as this may seem to believe, there was a time in recent memory when flying from point A to point B domestically or internationally was a relatively simple affair involving the purchase of a ticket and showing up at the airport. Today air travel has become a major undertaking that involves gigantic outlays of tax dollars to screen passengers for bombs or weapons that could be used to bring down an aircraft. Airline terrorism has been with us for several decades, but the major turning point was September 11, 2001 when four aircraft were hijacked after takeoff, two taking down the towers of the World Trade Center, one a piece of the Pentagon and one crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers fought back. We have reacted by imposing ever-stricter controls on airline passengers, controls that have repeatedly been shown to be overly expensive and ineffective. The one thing that we have steadfastly refused to do is to profile those who fit a certain pattern because it has somehow become more important for us to show that we are diverse and inclusive than it has to ensure air travelers arrive alive. We have gone so far as to compile lists of individuals who are not to fly on aircraft bound for the U.S., as well as a watch list of people suspected of terrorist ties; yet somehow we haven’t managed to cross-reference the two. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was on the latter list, along with 550,000 other names of individuals whom the Department of Homeland Security feels is too comfy with the idea of killing Americans or Jews in the name of Allah. The size of this list is indicative of the scope of the problem.

We do not have the will to defend ourselves against radical Islamists

The fact that we have lists with hundreds of thousands of names of possible terrorists or sympathizers signifies that we do not have the will to defend ourselves against radical Islamists because if we did, then anyone by the name of Mohamed or Abdul or yes, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab would have been pulled aside and gone over with a fine-toothed comb. The idea that there is something disgraceful about profiling is a hangover from the 70s and 80s when profiling young black men seemed to be in vogue among police in certain parts of America. Those days are long gone and the stakes have risen too considerably to attempt to attempt to demonstrate our cultural sensitivity and inclusiveness. We need to stop harassing little old Irish grannies at airport security checkpoints and start instituting secondary scrutiny of anyone who remotely fits the profile of a possible terrorist. This would include everyone with a passport from an Islamic nation and certainly everyone who has the misfortune of presenting a passport with a name that could possibly have originated in an Islamic country. Anyone who feels that this is too onerous can certainly avoid the unpleasantry of more robust inspections by choosing to fly to Togo, rather than New York or Toronto. Making all airline travelers bear the inconvenient burden of added scrutiny in order to board an aircraft because Islamists are attempting to blow the planes up is vaguely akin to a farmer punishing his sheep because a fox has gotten into his henhouse. A sensible farmer would get his shotgun and go after the fox, which is a lesson that the powers that be in Western nations seem to have forgotten. There is absolutely nothing wrong with profiling to catch those who would do us grievous harm. After all, the gun control nuts among us engage in wholesale profiling of anyone who owns a gun as a possible violent threat to society.