National Ledger : Passengers on a Plane

Passengers on a Plane

By Sher Zieve | August 20, 2006

As US Democrats and the worldwide leftist power elite continue to push their patently insane message “It’s better to die than to be politically incorrect”, an intrepid group of airline passengers finally decided to take matters into their own hands. In the early morning hours of Wednesday, 150 passengers scheduled to fly Monarch Airlines flight ZB 613 from Malaga to Manchester either refused to board or walked off their plane.

The reason for this unprecedented action? It appears that they didn’t think Wednesday was a particularly good day to die. As legal groups and airlines continue to balk at passenger profiling (in the United States the ACLU-CAIR Alliance calls it “unconstitutional”) and are still failing to check all passengers for newly banned items, these passengers became fed up. Instead, their collective group decided to perform its own profiling.

The passenger revolt is reported to have begun when two passengers, despite the intense heat, were observed in the waiting/boarding lounge wearing leather jackets, thick jumpers and were continually checking their watches. They were also talking to one another in what a passenger believed was an “Arabic language”. Apparently, six passengers initially refused to board the flight and then word spread to those already on board. One family, followed by the other boarded passengers, stood up and walked off the plane. The two passengers in dispute were eventually led off of the flight, the plane’s cabin was checked and cleared and it finally took off for its destination. The two men are said to have taken another flight, later in the day.

One of the passengers, college lecturer Jo Schofield who was flying with her family, said: “The plane was not yet full and it became apparent that people were refusing to board. In the gate waiting area, people had been talking about these two, who looked really suspicious with their heavy clothing, scruffy, rough, appearance and long hair. Some of the older children, who had seen the terror alert on television, were starting to mutter things like, 'Those two look like they're bombers’.”

A Tory Homeland Security spokesman Patrick Mercer blasted the passengers’ actions with: “This is a victory for terrorists. These people on the flight have been terrorized into behaving irrationally!” But, was their behavior irrational? Let’s take a look at history and a couple of recent events.

We already know that the 9/11 terrorist masterminds performed “trial runs” on the flights they eventually commandeered and used as missiles against the Twin Towers, the Pentagon and were attempting to fly Flight 93 into either the White House or the US Capitol building—before it was brought down by passengers and crashed into a Pennsylvania field. It is also strongly believed that these trial runs are continuing. The recently foiled UK terrorist plot was designed by al-Qaeda to explode and bring down at least ten US airline carriers—and all passengers—over the Atlantic Ocean. Two of the arrested terrorists, a man and a woman, purportedly admitted they planned to use one of their infant son’s formula bottles to store liquid explosives.

On 16 August a woman carried banned items, including a screwdriver, Vaseline and matches onto her flight. A note referring to al-Qaeda was also later discovered in the woman’s possession. Despite all warnings against banned items, she was allowed on board a flight bound from London’s Heathrow Airport to Washington DC. The woman’s aberrant in-flight behaviors eventually led to her being apprehended and taken down by other passengers. And Fox News’ Brian Wilson said that on two flights he took last week, passengers were allowed to take bottles filled with water (another recently banned item) onboard his flights. Wilson said that when he brought the items up to a flight attendant, he was advised that the airline employee saw ‘no problem with it’.

Personal Note: This flight attendant should be fired.

The larger issue, here, is that when even airline employees refuse to adhere to the newly-established safety rules, how are passengers supposed to protect themselves and their loved ones from the radical Islamic terrorist menace? Apparently, the head-in-the-sand syndrome has even spread to this most currently vulnerable airline industry. It appears that if “we the flying public” are going to be safe, no one but ourselves is going to save us. The hell with political correctness! We need more mutinies of this nature. It’s our money paying for these trips and, ultimately, our lives that are in jeopardy. If the airlines and our “PC” brethren don’t like it, I say “Then follow your own rules!”

I now doubt that anything will bring the so-called “moderate Muslims” out from their hiding places, in order to speak against their suicidal and homicidal brethren. But, at least a few, or many, more of these mutinies might just get the airlines to step up and listen. Contrary to politically-correct opinion, profiling is a good thing—at least if you want to have your best chance of remaining alive.

Sher Zieve is an author and political commentator.