Kudos For Mutinous Air Passengers

By now you've probably heard the story of the passengers of Flight 613, a Monarch Air flight from Malaga to Manchester, who refused to fly on the plane because two very suspicious men of "Asian" appearance were acting shifty and speaking what appeared to be Arabic.

Tory homeland security spokesman Patrick Mercer said of the incident:

This is a victory for terrorists. These people on the flight have been terrorised into behaving irrationally. For those unfortunate two men to be victimised because of the colour of their skin is just nonsense. (source)

Nonsense? More nonsensical than than probing white grannies and babies for evidence of bombs? More nonsensical than than telling the population to be on the alert, then condemning them for being on the alert?

The leftybloggers piled on, too. Here's Glenn Greenwald at Unclaimed Territory:

All of the fear-mongering and political exploitation of terrorism from the Bush administration and its loyal supporters (including the British Prime Minister) is starting to produce predictable results. Passengers are becoming unwilling to fly on planes with Arab males.

Ron in Middle Earth Journal:

Sadly, this doesn't even come as a surprise anymore. The efforts of this administration and its mouthpieces on the right wing have apparently succeeded in convincing a large number of otherwise civilized people that we are not fighting a group of radical, criminal terrorists, but are in fact engaged in a war with the religion of Islam itself.

And this, from Dave Johnson at Seeing the Forest:

President Bush recently changed his definition of who "the enemy" is from bin Laden and the al Queda terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 to "Islamic fascists" in general, sending the right after Islam in general and Middle Easterners in particular.

See the trend? The incident did not occur because Islamists, and no one but Islamists, are taking down our towers, blowing up our trains, killing our vacationers and plotting, always plotting, against airplanes full of us.

No, it occured because George W. Bush is president and the right stupidly follows him anywhere. The one size fits all fix for all that ails you. These guys should get a new chorus; this one's grinding pretty hard on the ear drums.

So, what should have happened on Flight 613? Exactly what happened. News reports say there was no panic, no racist taunts, no physical abuse of the two suspicious characters. Moms and dads simply looked at their kids, then at the two scruffy guys who were wearing heavy clothes in hot weather, and said "Not this flight."

Would the Tories and the Leftists take away our civil self-determination? Are we forbidden from politely making up our own minds?

And if a Muslim is offended by all this, there's some good in that. Until Muslims can get their religion reigned in, until they can control those who commit unspeakable attrocities in the name of Allah, they deserve to be offended.

And if they're as righteous as the Left would have you believe the two scruffies on Flight 613 were, they will react well, and attack the sickness in their religion, not us.

hat-tip: memeorandum
Related Tags: Flight 613, Terrorism