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Jewish World Review Nov. 17, 2010/ 10 Kislev, 5771 Grope and Change By Arnold Ahlert
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Perhaps I am overly prudish, but the thought of a complete stranger groping my genitalia as a prerequisite for boarding an airplane is a bridge too far. Of course one can opt for a full body scan instead, which is essentially a digitized version of a strip search accompanied by a healthy enough dose of radiation that pilots and flight attendants are refusing to submit to it. Just before the busiest travel season of the year, these are the two, and only two options our government offers us if we intend to use air travel as our transportation choice.
Americans, quite rightly, are outraged by such an unseemly invasion of one's personal space. Not merely because such an invasion itself is uncomfortable and best and demeaning at worst, but because government-enforced gropes and peeps are the triumph of political correctness over common sense and common decency. Even more importantly, the ultimate destination of political correctness itself is also revealed: American airports are well on their way to becoming de facto totalitarian states.
Such an assessment is no longer arguable. When the state commands the power to subject citizens to a full-body search without the slightest concern for reasonable suspicion or probable cause, they are effectively obliterating one of the bedrock principals of our Constitution, aka the presumption of innocence. They do this because political correctness demands a subjugation of reality to a preconceived — and utterly misguided — notion of "fairness."
In other words, despite over three decades of terrorist attacks perpetrated almost exclusively by Muslims, and of those Muslims, a subset of males between the ages of 17 and 45, government is determined to remain "equally suspicious" of everybody. Thus, grandmothers and four year olds are compelled to submit in equal proportions, lest charges of "Islamophobia" or "bigotry" and the inevitable litigation those charges would engender arise.
Such litigation is the mother's milk of political correctness. It makes genuine airport security an actionable offense. It is also a boon for terrorists. Once it becomes necessary to subject everyone to the same procedure that could be reserved for those who fit a particular profile or behavioral pattern, the numbers, as they say, on the terrorists' side. A thousand random searches is far likelier to produce a careless, bureaucratically-inspired error than a hundred purposeful ones would.
Americans are well-acquainted with the shortcomings of large bureaucracies in general, the Transportation Security Administration's dubious track record in particular. For example, it didn't matter that would-be Christmas Eve bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's own father notified the State Department that his son had been radicalized, and could be a potential threat. Such information ended up in bureaucratic limbo, and his name was never added to the no-fly list that would have prevented him from boarding the plane. Nothing but the incompetence of the bomb-maker and/or Abdulmutallab himself, coupled with the alertness of a passenger, prevented a major tragedy.
Adding insult to incompetence, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano proclaimed "the system worked." Really? Then why have full body scans and institutionalized groping become the new imperative?
Because profiling is a non-starter with the politically correct crowd. Thus the "reasoning" becomes circular: because profiling is forbidden, we must examine everyone, which increases the possibility of error. The increased possibility of error necessitates increasing amounts of stringency, which must be continually ratcheted up — in order to avoid profiling.
Is profiling discriminatory? Certainly irrational profiling is. But what if it is based on the aforementioned statistical reality that the overwhelming preponderance of terrorist attacks are committed by a particular group of people? The overwhelming hypocrisy of political correctness is revealed when singling out certain groups of people for different treatment is called something else — like affirmative action, for example. The PC crowd which disdains racial profiling at airports has no problem when certain racial groups are singled out for different treatment in the workplace, on college campuses, or in government contracts.
Yet if different treatment is acceptable when it applies to a minority, why can't the same reasoning apply to the majority? Why can't we assume that the majority of people attempting to fly are innocent, and use limited resources to focus on people statistically more inclined towards terrorism? That is precisely what the Israelis do, and El-Al airlines hasn't been subjected to a terrorist attack in over thirty years. Their focus is unapologetically aimed at profiling — both people's behavior, which is probably the most effective method of determining a potential problem, and giving special attention to Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 45.
If published news reports are accurate, Americans have reached the breaking point. They are incensed by a government whose adherence to the ideological purity of PC has turned air travel from a major inconvenience into thoroughly intimidating and humiliating experience for millions of people. It is bad enough to be groped or scanned personally. But it must also absolutely enrage a father, for example, to watch his underage children having their crotches probed, or their grandmother being subjected to a full-body scan.
But there is a bigger concern as well. What happens if terrorists pull off a successful attack on a train or a bus? What if they target schools or shopping malls? Would the government be inclined to expand their totalitarian mini-universe beyond the limits of our airports? Would Americans actually submit to gropes and scans in order to go shopping? Is such a question far-fetched?
Anyone who has witnessed the exponential expansion of "security" cameras in the public arena can imagine what a series of terrorist attacks might beget in terms of a government determined to "make people feel safer." We have already rendered Ben Franklin's idea that "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" virtually obsolete. And with respect to airports, we've done so with only marginal resistance — until now.
When 9/11 occurred, Americans were hectored not to radically alter their lifestyles. To do so, we were told, would be "letting the terrorists win." If lining people up like cattle for a group-peep or a group-grope — in order to protect political correctness — isn't a victory for terrorism, one would be hard-pressed to imagine what is. Even more distressing, it is the same PC mentality which prevents us from fully engaging the radical Islam which begets the terror, which begets the spectacle airport "security" has become.
To be fair, Americans who are "tired of war" have to decide whether being humiliated at airports is a fair tradeoff for engaging in half-hearted "contingency operations" against radical Islam both at home and abroad. We have to decide whether giving radical Islamic preachers, teachers and prison chaplains free reign to promote domestic jihadism, while we stand essentially naked before a TSA employee, is in our best interests.
Terrorists who are dead, jailed or hiding caves don't blow up airplanes.
As for profiling Muslims, no one likes to see any group of people bear the burden of suspicion for the actions of a radical minority. But reality is reality, and perhaps such reality has an upside: maybe so-called moderate Muslims will begin helping America root out the bad actors in their midst, even if it's for no other reason than the self-interest of making travel less of a burden for themselves. Right now only one thing is certain: if government persists in maintaining the current procedures, the airline industry is headed for oblivion.
Isn't bankrupting the airline industry a victory for terrorism?
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© 2010, Arnold Ahlert |
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