Members of air crews from three unidentified countries have turned up among the tiny minority of extremists in terrorist databases. From CNN, with thanks to US Action:
Nine of the 12 had associated with terrorists or supported terrorist organizations, two were using fraudulent passports and one had a criminal record for assaulting a U.S. law enforcement officer, according to Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary for Border and Transportation Asa Hutchinson. ...Hutchinson said a similar check of 2.7 million truck drivers who were licensed to carry hazardous materials in the United States has not turned up anyone with clearly established ties to terrorism, but he said 29 "potential persons of interest" are undergoing additional checks by law enforcement.
One of the 29 has already been expelled from the U.S. for unrelated reasons.
I seem to remember that an Egyptian airliner was deliberately crashed into the sea a few years ago by a fanitical co-pilot. But as I recall, the press and investigators deny that it was deliberately crashed despite the cockpit tapes recording the struggle between the pilot who said "Pull up with me brother" and the co-pilot who shouted "Allahu Akbar" before impact. I seem to remember the crash was filmed by an onlooker on a very crowded beach.
The point is, it certainly is possible an Islamist operative...pilot could be motivated to crash his airliner into a major American city after a trans-Atlantic flight. This point was raised before Sepetember 11, 2001.
The downing of TWA Flight 800 also raises some valid questions about Shoulder launched missiles. Was Flight 800 shot out of the Long Island sky? I am not so sure. But It seems odd that an airliner could "spontaneously" explode. What about the explosives resin fount in the wreckage and the various people who claim there was an object streaking upward? Before 9/11 I was highly sceptical of such claims.
Using airplanes as weapons may actually be a lesser priority Than attempting to smuggle a small nuke into America onboard a container ship.
If the enemy gains possession of one or more of the 30 or so missing "Suitcase Nukes" from the former Soviet union, there is NO doubt their all out plan would be to get it here to NY, Chicago, Los Angles, etc and detonate it.
Do they have the knowhow to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon? Probably not but presumably the cost of the nuke would include an instructions manual.
How easy it would be to get into the country. The difficult part would be obtaining one, but with time, and proliferation, nuclear weapons will Certainly fall into the hands of the Islamists. Zero doubt. And they will deploy them for mass murder in America (The left will remind us of Herioshima) zero doubt. It is only a matter of time.
So how will it all end? Can our societies deal with an ideologically driven relentless enemy indifinately? Will the colonization of the West ultimately transform Europe and America as was done in the Middle East, almost all of Africa, the phillipines etc, etc...into providences of the worldwide Islamic caliph?
Hypothetical:
You are acquainted with two pilots who work for commercial airlines -- in fact, they take turns flying the small plane, which holds about 20 passengers, on the commuter route from New York to Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket during the summer. In such a small plane, there is a chance to talk to the pilots, to engage in pleasantries and banter with them, before and after the flight. As it happens, both are easy-going fellows; you've been flying with them -- one on the route out, one on the route back, -- for several years. On cloudless mornings, on inenubilated evenings, you fly to and fro, aller et retour, without incident.
But you learned from the concerned and gossipy stewardess last summer, that bad things have happened to both of them. For Robert, or"Bob", those bad things involve his children: his oldest son was arrested for selling drugs in high school. His daughter left home to "try to get into the movie business" and has not been heard from since. For "Mo" (you never knew his real name was Mohammad) those bad things involve his girlfriend, who kept threatening to leave him and finally did so, and also his financial situation. At one point, giddy with expectation and having followed a hot tip provided, in fact, by one of his passengers, Mo took his life savings and put it into a fund specializing in investments in East Asian stocks, and now when he wakes up every morning with the rising sun, he hears again how the Nikkei Index has been sinking fast, and the Hang Seng is also feeling poorly. Indeed, the stewardess heard a while ago that he had to sell his condominium.
Curiously, both men seem to have found the same consolation for their woes in a renewed, or re-found, faith -- the faiths of their fathers. Bob, never much of a churchgoer, is now a regular on Sunday. He has even joined a choir. He tithes, with pleasure, and sends money to missionaries in Africa. He is seldom without his Bible, and his conversation is now peppered with Biblical phrases, some of which sound strange to you. "Oh, he's a Daniel come to judgment" he says to you about someone, and you think you are in the presence of a nineteenth-century a preacher man. You wonder if Bob listens to those holy-roller stations -- as you used to call them when, staying in a motel in a southern town, you turned on the radio or the television. Bob tells you that he is a re-born Christian, and he cannot tell you what a relief it has been, how happy he feels, how he wishes everyone could find peace in the Lord. Sometimes he jokes as he walks from the terminal to the plane about his own new-found faith, and you are amused that he can both have that faith, and joke about it, too.
"Mo" on the other hand, does not speak to you the way he used to -- in fact, he does not talk to, the passengers at all. He does not look directly at the stewardess, whom he has known for years. He has grown a beard. He seems very intense, concentrating on his work, and his facial expressions hint at thoughts that are far, far away from you and everyone else. Yet he continues to do his job as competently as Bob does. The stewardess whispers to you that Mo does a lot of reading now, whenever he can, from a pocket Qur'an he carries around. Bob, of course, carries a Bible in the same way, though he does not read it all the time, in every free moment. Why, even while waiting in the tiny terminal, with its potted geraniums and single brisk employee, who always wears a white short-sleeved shirt with a retractable pen in the shirt-pocket, he can be seen reading from his Qur'an -- the stewardess knows because she asked him what that book, in the strange language, was, and he told her it was the Holy Qur'an. She says that Mo goes to a small room in the back, and prays facing toward Mecca, and that on a few occasions he did so right on the floor of the terminal proper, seemingly oblivious to everyone, and even, once, on the tarmac, she said -- something she never saw him do before.
Both pilots, it seems clear to you, have found in their new or renewed fervor, some kind of answer to their problems, and to whatever psychic disarray they felt.
Do you feel the same now as you used to, about getting into the plane with Mo as with Bob? Are there any differences in the level of calm, or of qualms? Are those differences justified, or are you just being silly?
Time allotted: as long as you want. But make sure you think before answering, and fill only one side of the blue book, and try to tell the truth.
Hugh's 'hypothetical' brings me back to an opinion that I have stated many times, but will repeat: there are no moderate Muslims! They might be ignorant of the 'full' Islamic message, but they could very easily 'wake up', and be part of the Friday-self-reinforcing-hate-the-infidel-mosque-goer. But they just as well might be sleepers, fifth column members who are waiting for 'the signal'. We simply cannot trust any of them, no matter how 'nice' they might seem. Are their daughters being treated like chattel? Do they give zakat that ends up at Hamas' doorstep? Do they teach their children to love (or at least respect) or to hate others? You don't know and neither do I. I have talked to so many kind people who are initially shocked at this attitude, since Islam "is a religion of peace, tolerance and compassion", and they were raised to believe that a religion must be good, Islam is one of the 'world's great religions', etc, until I start laying the most basic things about Islam.
To the objection that 'hatred of the other' can come from many, and not just Muslim sources, I say sure, but we are talking about Muslims and Islam here, and not white supremacists.
JihadWatch has struck a nerve and now gets more than 10 million hits per month.
NoJihad joins the fight against the Jihad, both in America and world-wide:
1) We at NoJihad have collected ALL of Hugh's past postings and are putting them up on the site (with Hugh's blessings) along with a continually refined word index, to create an 'Internet Book' of the 'Writings Of Hugh'. Go to Hugh's JihadWatch Posts. We are about 15% done, and falling behind all the time. Feedback welcome at wwwnojihad@yahoo.com. Click here for Islam For The Perplexed, that execellent primer that should printed and given out on street corners.
2) We are issuing an open invitation to anyone who wants to contribute to our site by writing cogent essays or doing a bloggish thing (like I do). No need to be a scholar (after all there is only one Hugh), just well-read. Email me at questioningIslam@yahoo.com.
3) We are trying to put together a letter to be sent ON A SPECIFIC DAY, say, after the election,
AND MONTHLY THEREAFTER, to the President and Vice President, along with the appropriate local
congress-people stating the facts about Islam, our concerns about current policy and specific
actions that we would like to be taken. IF 10,000 OR 100,000 OR 1,000,000 PEOPLE SENT EMAILS, our concerns cannot be ignored. It is one thing to preach to the converted, quite another to convert others to action. We should keep doing this until the government responds.
We will be putting up a first cut of the letter soon, and any suggestions for the content
of the letter can be sent to the above email address.
Ethelred Smith
Hugh,
OK, I'll attempt a short answer: You shouldn't have to concern yourself at all,that's what government is for - why you pay ever-increasing taxes, wait in ever-increasing security lines, answer ever-increasing personal questions,endure ever-increasing failures and incompetencies from an ever-increasingly corrupt bureaucracy.
And although right now smart money is on the Islamist, both men are exhibiting behavior and conforming to a known pattern (dare I say, shuddera profile)of instability that makes candidates of both of them...today it's the Islamist, but tommorrow, - we need to remember the father of Domestic Terrorism was a Christian Abolitionist, whose views (and subsequent attrocities) were so widely supported even in his own day that his execution was publicly protested and mourned by no less a pacifist than Henry David Thoreau.
As I have said before in these pages,long before we rush to devalue our hard-won inalienable rights (which we already have, and governments cannot grant, merely recognize and hold secure)we need to reach some sort of worldwide accord, based on shared, bitter experience and sound legal precedent, as to how much religion is too much - a daunting task indeed considering how recently the Church of Latter-Day Saints and the Roman Catholic Church (strange bedfellows to say the least)were compelled to file suit against a Texas Public School district under the then-Governor Bush to prevent Evangelicals (who, as it turns out, may actually have been the minority denomination) in teaching,administrative, and school board positions from discriminating against their children. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, whose finding for the plaintiffs was cited by Conservative Christian groups everywhere as another example of "activist judges" removing God from our (public) schools.Then factor in the bizarre game of leap-frog that the two denominations seem to be playing (last week, another priest indicted, this week, a Mormon elder nicked for online solicitation of a minor)and the manifest "above the law" contempt it exhibits, and we have a recipe for political disaster if ever there was one - shall we assume that the major denominations will regress, like their Islamic counterparts, into tribalism and eventually claim the same limited autonomy enjoyed by Native Americans?
Oh, and Andrew...to answer your many rhetorical questions,mostly "no". There was an article (either in Atlantic Monthly or Harper's, I can't remember which, although I'm sure I saved the issue) about twenty years ago regarding the impending collapse of the Soviet Union (Yes, we knew, we were only suprised by the timing)by a retired member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff entitled (the article, not the retiree)"We Will Miss the Cold War".The gist of the article was simply that now, without a "Resident Evil" totalitarian state to check their progress, the Free World (read: U.S.)would face, as did the world after the collapse of the Roman Empire,the Holy Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire,ad nauseum, about fifty years of short term, overlapping conflicts sponsored by wanna-bee rulers and suppressed (for good reason)religious groups. The principle difference from previous conflicts would be the virtual impossibility to clearly distinguish one group from another, as well as their ability to take the fight anywhere. So, there were those of us that did know this was coming. And for the record, the briefcase bomb scenario has been with us from the late 1960's..."all day have we labored, under the sun - and still nothing is done".
As far as the "flock of 12" and "convoy of 29" are concerned, it's good to see good police work, but, just as with the availability of nuclear material to the highest bidder, their very presence in this country comes down to three things:
1.)Corruption at the local level
2.)Corruption at the state level
3.)Corruption at the Federal level
Hugh, Phil: So the moral of the story is that life is a risky business no matter what.
That was hardly the lesson I would have drawn.
No, Kepha1, the moral of the story is, without Civilization, as Hobbes put it, “No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” And as long as we tolerate, through our tribalism, reactionism,and lack of accountability,both the civil and religious corruption that has tainted every part of our system of government, we have no Civilization, simply a "risky business" indistinguishable from that of our enemies.