John McGuirk

The aftermath of the attempted Christmas Day massacre aboard a Delta Flight bound for Detroit appears to have provoked yet another round of security modifications at US Airports. Because some guy made it aboard the plane with a bomb in his underwear, passengers are to be forbidden from leaving their seats for the last hour of the flights. New checks are to be added prior to boarding. Pilots are to be prohibited from announcing the location of the flight at any particular time, so we can all kiss goodbye to those helpful announcements to look out our window and see the Rockies.

What, exactly, does this achieve? We’re already banned from taking liquids on board. When Richard Reid is a long time dead, we’ll still be taking off our shoes in perpetual homage to his failed attempt at shoe-bombing. And as much as the Government and security agencies turn us all into potential terrorists in a futile bid to catch the random psychopath, we’ll still be on our own in the sky when – not if – they next fail.

Meanwhile, without injuring a soul, Islamic nutters have managed to scare, inconvenience, and alter the routine of thousands of people, while burdening a struggling part of the economy with extra security costs. Almost every terrorist attack aboard an airline in the last two decades has been perpetrated by Muslims. In fact, the word “almost” at the beginning of the prior sentence is there purely to cover my ass, because I can’t remember one that was not committed by a person or persons of the Islamic faith.

So, why aren’t we profiling people based on faith and race? There is an infinitely higher probability that a person of the Islamic faith is a threat to the security of a flight. That isn’t a statement about their religion, it’s a statement about recorded fact and statistics. While we continue to pretend that everybody has an equal chance of being a terrorist, all we do is waste money, inconvenience people, and accomplish the terrorists own aims for them.

It’s also noteworthy that the bomber in this case was the university-educated son of a wealthy man, who himself is a moderate, civilised gentleman. This pernicious, and seemingly impenetrable left-wing fantasy that “education and integration” is the answer to Islamic extremism has once again exposed itself as wrong-headed, weak, and a complete misunderstanding of the threat we face.

Extreme, twisted Islam is the gravest threat to the security of the Western World. How many more planes will have to explode before we have a real discussion about how to combat it?