I want to emphasize at the outset, of course, that I am absolutely certain that this incident had nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. I mean, that’s obvious: Mohammed Ghanem wasn’t wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt. Nor was he carrying an Al-Qaeda membership card. Therefore this incident is simply an isolated case involving an innocent accident — why, just yesterday I was buttering my toast and when I was finished with the knife I accidently artfully concealed it inside my carved-out copy of Richard Grenier’s The Marrakesh One-Two. You know how these things can happen — and they’re purely innocent in every case, of course, particularly in cases involving Muslims with one-way tickets to Yemen. Why, to suggest otherwise would be profiling.
Oh, and of course Ghanem has clearly been suffering from mental problems, arising from the stress of his arranged marriage and his failed conversion to Christianity. His friends all say he’s a magnificently gentle soul who would never hurt a fly, although they add as well that he is utterly bonkers. So again, this has nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism. Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing. Did Mohammed Ghanem have any attachment to the jihad ideology? What are you, some kind of Islamophobe?
“Man Arrested in Airport Knife Scare,” from AP, with thanks to all who sent this in:
ROMULUS, Mich. (AP) – A man with a one-way ticket to Yemen attempted to board a plane with a knife hidden in a book, authorities said.
Mohammed Ghanem, 21, of Hamtramck, was jailed Saturday on $500,000 after being arraigned on a charge of possessing a weapon in the sterile area of an airport.
Ghanem was arrested Thursday at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after Transportation Security Administration officers detected the knife “artfully concealed” in the book, airport spokesman Michael Conway said.
Careful. If the book was the Book of Joshua, it could mean that Ghanem was up to serious no-good.
Someone had carved out the inside of the book and placed the knife inside it, said Ghanem’s attorney, Nabih Ayad.
“He said he didn’t know where the knife came from,” Ayad told the Detroit Free Press.
Well, that’s reasonable. Has anyone checked to see if David Copperfield or Uri Geller was in the airport at the time?
If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
Ghanem was born in Yemen, a republic bordering Saudi Arabia whose 18 million residents are primarily Muslim. He is now a legal permanent resident of the United States and was returning to Yemen to get married, Ayad said.
Ghanem works as a busboy and lives in Hamtramck with family members, but he had a one-way ticket to Yemen, authorities said.