The sole purpose of the Flying Imams” lawsuit is to intimidate the pilots and crews of planes. And it would have included passengers, but the effect on an angry public, quite capable of identifying with those passengers, was deemed to be too dangerous for the “image” of Islam. That image is sinking fast in any case, with each new outrage, and this lawsuit is one of those outrages.
But here there is a question of money. Who should pay the costs of defending such a lawsuit? Should it be U.S. Airways alone? If what the pilots and crew did was in the interests of all passengers on all flights — and clearly it was — and if those Muslims who are attempting to intimidate them are also attempting to intimidate the pilots and the crews (and the passengers, even if the “John Doe” part of the lawsuit was prudently dropped at the last minute), then it is all pilots, and all crews, and all passengers, in the United States who should be paying for the defense of those particular pilots, that particular crew.
Other airlines should offer not merely moral but financial support. There ought, perhaps, to be added on to airline tickets the cost of defending against such malevolent and dangerous litigation. For we will all suffer if the lawsuit succeeds, and we will all gain — those of us who are not in the business of pushing the Jihad against Infidels, in any way we can — if the defense against the lawsuit is successful. But it is important that the pain of the suit, the money that pays the lawyers, is shared by the entire population of passengers who take, or even rely on, travel by air.
Share the expense, and the pain — and that way the full and sinister nature of what is being attempted will be more widely understood and publicized. Do not let US Airways do it alone. It shouldn’t have to.
Their noisy and prolonged threat of suit, even if it is now over, no doubt has caused severe emotional stress to those passengers who had been — rationally — suspicious of the imams and reported them. In such circumstances, should not there be a lawsuit against the six imams for that very threat, and the way it continued until the very last, when Congressional legislation about those “John Does” was coming to the rescue?
Meanwhile, to prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future, perhaps a “Muslims-only” airline should be established — Muslims-only except for the pilots, lest the plane head you-know-where — and with a locked cabin, and possibly armed guards every few feet. Then Muslims can travel on that airline (oh, it can be a very big airline) and on no other. There would still be a security problem on other airlines for non-Muslims, for there will still be Muslim terrorists acting on the tenets of Islam as they not unreasonably interpret them, to conduct the Jihad by “striking terror” in the hearts of the enemy. But millions if not billions of man-hours in security-checks that are needless, would be saved each year, and in other ways also this would be a good solution. Islam divides the world between Believer and Infidel. As there is nothing that can be done to Islam (the canonical texts are immutable, and the gates of ijtihad slammed shut a thousand years ago, and self-dramatizing Irshad Manji is not about to swing them open), then Infidels, too, should come to regard the world as divided in this way. The world’s main division is now that between Believer (Muslim) and Infidel (non-Muslim). That makes a lot of sense. It helps clear the mental air. It makes a policy of self-defense against the Jihad much more possible. No more worries over what constitutes a “moderate” Muslim or how to keep a “moderate” safely and forever “moderate,” or how to make sure that the “moderate” Muslim’s children do not turn out, for on reason or another, to be “immoderate” (like some of those London bombers). No: Infidel and Muslim.
That’s what they believe. That’s what they think. That’s what many of them have acted upon in dar al-Islam, over a very long period, and given half a chance, that’s exactly how they would act in what, for now, is still the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels.
So we should believe, and distinguish, in precisely the same way. It’s the only way to protect ourselves.