Metastasizing political correctness leads to security lapses

“The Qur’an has commanded the believers, both men and women, to cover their private parts.

From The Ottawa Citizen

What’s scarier than terrorists? Lawyers

By David B. Harris, Citizen Special February 20, 2010

A month after the panty kamikaze and his explosive shorts smouldered their way into history, the Christmas day flame-up in a Detroit-bound airliner continues to raise questions about aviation security.

Despite occasional hysterics about “security theatre,” there is much to be said for emerging recommendations, like smart screening and body scanning. But Canadians must look at a particular problem — and an unorthodox solution — that, weeks later, continues to escape honest scrutiny.

The problem is the increasing threat that metastasizing political correctness presents to air-passengers. A possible answer involves the only group more widely dreaded than terrorists: lawyers.

Abd Al-Rahman Al-Rashed, former editor of the London-based Al-Sharq Al-Awsat newspaper, famously said “not all Muslims are terrorists but, regrettably, the majority of the terrorists in the world are Muslims.” The British Home Office reveals 91 per cent of those jailed or remanded on terror offences, are Muslim.

Meanwhile, a wave of Canadian Islamic terrorists has recently been convicted. Yet many worry airport and airline security officers so fear being falsely branded “anti-Muslim,” that they actually might not apply security measures as fully to Muslims, as to others. This sort of situation would amount to unfair privileging of a religious group, and a serious public safety lapse. Some invoke as an example of this exceptionalism the treatment of the alleged Fort Hood killer in his pre-massacre days.

Superiors seemed to dive for cover, rather than deal with Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s professional incompetence and menacing behaviour of a sort that would likely have gotten non-Muslims into deep trouble. One person of this view is retired U.S. navy Lt.-Cmdr. Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, now president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. “Our greatest liability is … the politically correct climate in America today which is negligently blind to the threat of political Islam,” he declared recently.

In this atmosphere, “Hasan hazards” might be ignored by bureaucrats wanting to avoid specious — and career-damaging — complaints and lawsuits from hardline Islamic groups and “human-rights” racketeers. Thanks to the money, organizing and propaganda of North America’s division-sowing Wahabbist and Muslim Brotherhood front organizations — and righteously-naïve human rights industry — “lawfare” offensives are part of the landscape and play on westerners’ self-image as tolerant progressives.

In aviation, many cite the Flying Imams case as an expression of a grooming of citizens for surrender to special treatment. In 2006, witnesses said they saw a group of imams causing upheavals on boarding a Minneapolis flight. The disturbance seemed calculated to get them thrown off the aircraft, to justify a victimhood-based lawsuit, and encourage a congressional anti-profiling bill that happened to be supported by a group with which the imams had just been meeting. The impression of planned provocation was reinforced by one imam’s history. He was the lawyer for a member of his mosque who, in 1999, tried to break into a cockpit on another flight — and sued after being detained. The 9/11 Commission later noted FBI suspicions the 1999 incident had been a dry run for a hijacking.

Even with all this, the Flying Imams’ airline made a cowardly climb-down and quietly settled the imams’ lawsuit without a fight.

This undermined security workers’ confidence in the aviation industry’s determination to back them up — especially because the imams initially tried to sue innocent passengers and crew who reported their antics. If inhibiting security was an aim, something the imams deny, it may have succeeded. And even if it wasn’t, the result is the same. Some theorize that the Flying Imams precedent could have influenced aviation security workers not to get in the way of the young Muslim whose underpants flamed out on Christmas day.

This is where the rest of us should look to lawyers. Passengers and others victimized by terror threats should be encouraged to sue airlines and other entities that have failed in their duty to safeguard passengers’ well-being. Where possible, public officials should similarly be targeted for allowing such situations to occur. Self-serving air industry and government executives must no longer regard flyers as statistical fodder for on-board frays that risk death or life-long — and expensive — post-traumatic stress diagnoses.

Enough. The next time your seatmate’s panties go pyrotechnic, consider suing those allowing boarding from insecure airports. And when airlines or airports bow to nuisance suits or claims for unfair privilege, Canadians must supplement their lawsuits with boycotts aimed at shifting the calculus of interest away from political correctness. Human rights must favour us all, equally.

With three decades in intelligence affairs, David B. Harris is a lawyer and director of the terrorism program, INSIGNIS Strategic Research Inc., an intervener’s counsel in the Air India Inquiry, and was a CSIS senior manager in 1988-90.

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