Israel Matzav

Shocka: Airports abroad ignoring Obama's orders

I'm sure you'll all be shocked to hear that airports in countries like Lebanon and Nigeria are not doing the 'extra careful screening' that Barack Obama has demanded for flights to the United States.

On the first day of what was supposed to be tighter screening ordered by the United States for airline passengers from certain countries, some airports around the world have conceded they had not cracked down.

The U.S. demanded more careful screening for people who are citizens of, or are flying from, 14 nations deemed security risks. But enforcement of the U.S. rules appeared spotty Monday.

"Everything is the same. There is no extra security," said an aviation official in Lebanon, one of the countries on the list. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The only way to get this screening done right is to send your own people to do it. That's what Israel does and that's what the US did in Europe in the period after 9/11. But don't hold your breath waiting for Obama to do that (Hat Tip: Volokh Conspiracy).

On a macro level, one has to wonder about the commitment of a president who invariably prefers to use the word "radical" to describe a "terrorist," and whose secretary for Homeland Security cannot easily bring herself to utter the word "terrorism," preferring instead a phrase—"man-caused disasters"—that should make most American jaws drop. (Of course, it may be that the one way to ensure a grassroots Democrats clamor for action against terrorism is to call it "anthropogenic"…)

The macro story is, alas, one of broader ideology, which tends to remain fixed in the course of an administration. We cannot expect Obama to fight terrorism with the zeal of a Bush, especially when it's clear that he regards his predecessor as a destructive Ahab obsessed with an Islamist "Moby-Dick." Obama is Starbuck, not merely more pragmatic than Ahab but immeasurably wiser: His mission is to keep the Pequod—America—out of harm's way.

No, President Obama cannot change his natural course, so the best we hope for is a minimization of political correctness in the daily, practical matter of keeping us secure from Islamist terrorists. So whereas any formal use of "profiling" as a tool may be politically unthinkable, we have made a useful start with this latest list of tainted countries.

...

Obama cannot say, formally, that our most pressing problem is with Islamist terrorism, even though incidents of terrorism by non-Muslims are trivial these days. And as we, as a society, are still bound fast to our proprieties, we cannot formally say that we are afraid of radicalized Muslims getting on planes to kill us. We cannot, formally, segregate Muslim passengers from the rest in airport security. We cannot, formally, say that the intellectual author of this terrorism is Saudi Arabia, and the main logistical base is Pakistan. Why, these last two are our dear friends. However, we have put those countries on a tainted list; and the taint is a soft form of profiling, since we really do not trust people who fly to America from those two countries. If we can’t profile people, we can, it seems, profile entire nations.

So 80-year old grandmothers will continue to be patted down and 12-year old kids will continue to have their bags searched while Muslim men in their 20's fly through the check-in lines.

What could go wrong?

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:57 PM