How the Israelis protect civilian airliners

They do it, not through gnostic magical operations, as all other Western countries do, but through the rational use of human intelligence, which includes, inter alia, ethnic profiling. Daniel Pipes tells how Israeli security in 1986 as a result of intelligent questioning of a 32 year old Irish woman boarding an El Al flight at Heathrow became suspicious of her and discovered that she was carrying four pounds of plastic Semtex explosive in her carry on.

It occurs to me that the reason the U.S. would balk at the Israeli approach is not just that it involves some ethnic profiling of passengers, but that the people doing the screening of passengers must be highly intelligent. Since this would mean that virtually none of the screening personnel would be black or nonwhite Hispanic, Israeli-type screening is out of the question for America—or, rather, it will be out of the question for America until whites reassert their natural leadership position in this country and throw out the idea that all racial groups must be proportionally represented in every area of life. (See my article where I explain how America can undo the fatal mistakes that led to the system of nonwhite racial privileges under which we now live.)

Here’s the Pipes article:

Security Theater Now Playing at Your Airport
by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post
January 6, 2010

As hands are wrung in the aftermath of the near-tragedy on a Northwest Airlines flight approaching Detroit, a conversation from London’s Heathrow airport in 1986 comes to mind.

It consisted of an El Al security agent quizzing one Ann-Marie Doreen Murphy, a 32-year-old recent arrival in London from Sallynoggin, Ireland. While working as a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane Murphy met Nizar al-Hindawi, a far-leftist Palestinian who impregnated her. After instructing her to “get rid of the thing,” he abruptly changed his tune and insisted on immediate marriage in “the Holy Land.” He also insisted on their traveling separately.

Murphy, later described by the prosecutor as a “simple, unsophisticated Irish lass and a Catholic,” accepted unquestioningly Hindawi’s arrangements for her to fly to Israel on El Al on April 17. She also accepted a wheeled suitcase with, unbeknown to her, a false bottom containing nearly 2 kilograms of Semtex, a powerful plastic explosive, and she agreed to be coached by him to answer questions posed by airport security.

Nizar al-Hindawi and Ann-Marie Murphy

(The classic situation of a spinster seduced by a Levantine Lothario,
only he wasn’t just a Lothario, he was a mass murdering terrorist who
sought to murder her along with hundreds of other innocent people.)

Murphy successfully passed through the standard Heathrow security inspection and reached the gate with her bag, where an El Al agent questioned her. As reconstructed by Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy in Washingtonian magazine, he started by asking whether she had packed her bags herself. She replied in the negative. Then:

“What is the purpose of your trip to Israel?” Recalling Hindawi’s instructions, Murphy answered, “For a vacation.”

“Are you married, Miss Murphy?” “No.”

“Traveling alone?” “Yes.”

“Is this your first trip abroad?” “Yes.”

“Do you have relatives in Israel?” “No.”

“Are you going to meet someone in Israel?” “No.

“Has your vacation been planned for a long time?” “No.”

“Where will you stay while you’re in Israel?” “The Tel Aviv Hilton.”

“How much money do you have with you?” “Fifty pounds.” The Hilton at that time costing at least £70 a night, he asked:

“Do you have a credit card?” “Oh, yes,” she replied, showing him an ID for cashing checks.

That did it, and the agent sent her bag for additional inspection, where the bombing apparatus was discovered.

Had El Al followed the usual Western security procedures, 375 lives would surely have been lost somewhere over Austria. The bombing plot came to light, in other words, through a non-technical intervention, relying on conversation, perception, common sense, and (yes) profiling. The agent focused on the passenger, not the weaponry. Israeli counterterrorism takes passengers’ identities into account; accordingly, Arabs endure an especially tough inspection. “In Israel, security comes first,” David Harris of the American Jewish Committee explains.

Obvious as this sounds, overconfidence, political correctness, and legal liability render such an approach impossible anywhere else in the West. In the United States, for example, one month after 9/11, the Department of Transportation issued guidelines forbidding its personnel from generalizing “about the propensity of members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or national origin group to engage in unlawful activity.” (Wear a hijab, I semi-jokingly advise women wanting to avoid secondary screening at airport security.)

Worse yet, consider the panicky Mickey-Mouse, and embarrassing steps the U.S. Transportation Security Administration implemented hours after the Detroit bombing attempt: no crew announcements “concerning flight path or position over cities or landmarks,” and disabling all passenger communications services. During a flight’s final hour, passengers may not stand up, access carry-on baggage, nor “have any blankets, pillows, or personal belongings on the lap.”

Some crews went yet further, keeping cabin lights on throughout the night while turning off the in-flight entertainment, prohibiting all electronic devices, and, during the final hour, requiring passengers to keep hands visible and neither eat nor drink. Things got so bad, the Associated Press reports, “A demand by one attendant that no one could read anything … elicited gasps of disbelief and howls of laughter.”

Widely criticized for these Clouseau-like measures, TSA eventually decided to add “enhanced screening” for travelers passing through or originating from fourteen “countries of interest”—as though one’s choice of departure airport indicates a propensity for suicide bombing.

The TSA engages in “security theater“—bumbling pretend-steps that treat all passengers equally rather than risk offending anyone by focusing, say, on religion. The alternative approach is Israelification, defined by Toronto’s Star newspaper as “a system that protects life and limb without annoying you to death.”

Which do we want—theatrics or safety?

Jan. 6, 2010 update: I lacked space in the column to play out this ultimate scenario: What if a very large group of hijackers gets on a plane, enough of them so that with muscle alone—no knives, guns, or bombs—they overpower the passengers and crew? What if they threaten the pilots to strangle one person after another until the plane comes under their control? No amount of technology can prevent such a scenario; only scrutiny of who is getting aboard can do so.

And while there has been no such large group, “Those Fourteen Syrians on Northwest Airlines Flight #327” represented a possible step in that direction.

[end of Pipes column]

- end of initial entry -

James P. writes:

You wrote:

It occurs to me that the reason the U.S. would balk at the Israeli approach is not just that it involves some ethnic profiling of passengers, but that the people doing the screening of passengers must be highly intelligent. Since this would mean that virtually none of the screening personnel would be black or nonwhite Hispanic, Israeli-type screening is out of the question for America—or, rather, it will be out of the question for America until whites reassert their natural leadership position in this country and throw out the idea that all racial groups must be proportionally represented in every area of life.

Every time I go to Dulles I take note of the fact that almost every employee of the airlines and TSA is a non-Asian minority, often female, and is usually a halfwit who can barely speak English. I don’t care if they are government employees subject to background checks, or if they are loyal, native-born Americans (which I doubt), these people are obviously stupid. They are barely capable of making everyone jump through the hoops that “security theater” prescribes. I am certain that actual bad guys would walk right past them.

LA replies:

Yes, when I said “proportional representation,” that was a huge understatement. There’s no proportional representation of minorities at all—airport security is a largely black and Hispanic universe.

So, just taking a very rough rule of thumb, if Jews have an average IQ of 113, and if blacks and nonwhite HIspanics in America have an average IQ of, say, 88, then American airline security has a 25 IQ point disadvantage compared with Israeli airport security.

LA continues:

You could almost make a Jewish joke out of it: God surrounded the Jews with people wanting to exterminate them, and with a whole world giving moral support to the would-be exterminators; but he also gave them the intelligence to survive.

James P. replies:

I believe that in the past, some have argued that Israeli-style security screening would be too expensive. Yet what is it going to cost to implement the idiocies they now plan to implement? The up front cost, plus the wasted time, would surely pay for effective screening. Yet the problem would still remain that an effective screening force would not “look like America”. No doubt written tests designed to identify effective screeners would provoke howls of outrage and lawsuits from blacks and Hispanics, who would rarely pass.

Kidist Paulos Asrat writes

“The classic situation of a spinster seduced by a Levantine Lothario”

Very funny caption!

I always wonder about these women, who get duped by men who are clearly after something. Often it is an older, single, career woman, in her forties (although mid-thirties also qualifies), who gets financially scammed by such an artist. This one, though, takes the prize with her far-lefty Muslim Palestinian freedom fighter. No alarm bells going off there?!

LA replies:

Well, her excuse was that she was a simple Catholic girl. At 32.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 06, 2010 11:24 AM | Send