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Jewish ritual item mistaken for bomb causes terror scare

January 22, 2010

A teenage passenger using Jewish ritual items for prayer prompted a plane’s captain to call the bomb squad and divert a Kentucky-bound plane to Philadelphia on Thursday, Reuters reports.

A 17-year-old boy on US Airways Flight 3079 from New York to Louisville was using phylacteries (in Hebrew, tefillin), which are a pair of small black boxes that hold parchments inscribed with biblical passages that, using attached leather straps, observant men strap to their heads and arm as a part of daily morning prayer, as Deuteronomy 6:8 instructs, “Tie them [these commandments] as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.”

A passenger saw the boy using the tefillin, mistook them for some sort of device or bomb, and became alarmed.

The plane landed without incident, the passengers and crew were taken off the plane, and no one was arrested or charged with any crime, a spokesman for US Airways said.

Jewish traditions calls for observant men to prayer three times daily in quorums of 10; tefillin are used only during the morning service. This can be problematic during long flights, when men have need to pray in a quorum, but little space to do so. After security was tightened following 9/11 and other plane-related terror incidents, many rabbinic authorities have stated that Jewish men should avoid congregating in quorums on planes — both out of common courtesy for other passengers and out of respect for the airlines’ security measures.

The boy was likely praying in his seat, but nonetheless alarmed a fellow passenger. Apparently, there was no one in the flight crew who was familiar with the items — unusual considering that the flight originated in New York, where thousands of observant Jews fly daily.

Man screaming “kill Jews” hauled off flight

January 7, 2010

MIAMI – A man who described himself as a Palestinian and said he wanted to “kill all the Jews” was hauled off a Detroit-bound Delta Air Lines flight in Miami and arrested, Reuters is reporting:

The plane was taxiing away from the terminal at Miami International Airport on Wednesday night when 43-year-old Mansor Mohammad Asad of Toledo, Ohio, began making loud anti-Semitic comments and chanting, apparently in Arabic, Miami-Dade police said in a statement.

“I’m Palestinian and I want (to) kill all Jews,” he said, according to witnesses.

The pilot returned the aircraft to the terminal and a Taser device was used to “neutralize” Asad after he charged an arresting officer, the police statement said.

We’re pleasantly surprised that that actually got him kicked off the plane. They probably worried that he’d snuck a bottle of soda on with him.

Holocaust museum attacker dies in jail

January 6, 2010

The 89-year-0ld white supremacist charged with gunning down a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington last June died this morning at a North Carolina prison hospital, CNN reports.

James von Brunn was indicted by a federal grand jury in July on charges he murdered Stephen Tyrone Johns in the June 10 attack. Johns had worked as a guard at the museum for six years.

“He was just very sick,” said public defender A.J. Kramer of his client’s death. Von Brunn was shot during the attack when officers returned fire.

Von Brunn, a self-avowed white supremacist, was a known Holocaust denier who created an anti-Semitic Web site called “The Holy Western Empire.”

Besides his underwear, bomber blew up worldview

Panty-bomber Abdulmutallab

National Review’s Rich Lowry makes some salient points in an excellent article about the real impact of Christmas day’s would-be panty-bomber. Lowry argues that, more than anything, the case of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his underwear should make clear what it is that the West–and Israel–are fighting:

His failed attempt put paid to the notion that terrorism is the byproduct of a few, specific U.S. policies and of our image abroad. This view dominates the Left and animates the Obama administration. It informs its drive to shutter Guantanamo Bay, to get out of Iraq, and to cater to “international opinion.” If we are only nice and likable enough, goes the theory, the Abdul Mutallabs of the world will never be tempted to violent mayhem.

Abdulmutallab didn’t care that the terrorist detention center in Guantanemo Bay is being closed, nor whether senior terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed faces a military tribunal or a civilian trial in New York, nor was he moved by the President’s understanding in his “new beginning” speech in Cairo last summer. Says Lowry, he didn’t care about a “year’s worth of international goodwill gestures. He just wanted to destroy an airliner”:

It shouldn’t be hard to fathom why. Abdul Mutallab was in the grip of a violent ideology with an existential hatred of the United States at its core, an ideology promoted by a global terrorist conspiracy under the loose rubric of al-Qaeda.

 This, Lowry says, is the essential fact that a significant portion of our country tends to minimize or deny. And it’s the same thing Israel faces a few thousand miles to our east.

Bizarro world

December 30, 2009

“We are headed toward the moment when screeners will watch [those on the terrorist watch list] sashay through while we have to come to the airport in hospital gowns, flapping open in the back.”

Who wrote that? Mark Steyn? Jonah Goldberg? Some other cheeky conservative?

Nope.

Maureen Dowd, the smarter-than-thou, reflexively left New York Times columnist.

We know there must be a special Hebrew blessing to say over this. But we don’t know which one.

New airline security rules don’t reassure Jeffrey Goldberg

December 28, 2009

Atlantic national correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg is always a good read on Israel and on the war on terror. An American secular Jew, he made aliyah to Israel, served in the IDF, but eventually moved back to the U.S., where he’s written about Israel from the left-of-center, often critical of the Jewish state, but usually fair and always interesting.

He’s written a great deal about the world on terror. This morning, he’s lamenting the “stupidity” that’s “too much to bear” from the new guidelines for international air travel, which–in response to the panty-bomber–stipulate the U.S.-bound passengers on international flights will undergo a ”thorough pat-down” at boarding gates, focused on the upper legs and torso.

Goldberg is not impressed:

Thanks for letting us know, TSA, that the search should be focused on the upper legs and torso. As I’ve said on numerous occasions, pat-downs that ignore the [groin and bottom] are useless. We recently saw in Saudi Arabia the detonation of a rectal bomb, so it really doesn’t take much creativity to imagine that terrorists will be taping explosives to their scrotums. Of course, TSA is not going to be feeling-up people’s scrotums anytime soon, so the question remains: Why does our government continue to make believe that it can stop terrorists from boarding civilian planes when anyone with half-a-brain and a spare two minutes can think up a dozen ways to bypass the symbolic security measures at our airports?

Next item: “Passengers must remain seated for the final hour before landing. During that time, they may not have access to their carry-on baggage or hold personal items on their laps.” But what about their underwear? Can they have access to their underwear, which is where our latest would-be Muslim martyr apparently hid his bomb? And why can’t we have access to our laptops, if they’ve already been screened?

By the way, these rules, the Washington Post says, are in effect only until December 30th. In January, you see, the jihad is over. That, or the TSA needs until December 30th to properly promulgate a formal set of inane new rules, to add to the inane rules currently in place. Here’s an alternative suggestion for the Obama administration: Focus on capturing and killing Islamist terrorists overseas. By the time they get to the airport, it is, generally speaking, too late.

Oh come on already

December 27, 2009

Read this piece from London’s Independent, which marvels at the fact that the guy who tried to blow up a plane with his underwear comes from a comfortable background.

Um, do no mainstream journalists remember who the 9-11 bombers were? (All upper middle-class, all educated? “Young men from good backgrounds,” as this Washington Post piece puts it.)

When will the Western world get that terrorism is about ideology — a fanatical stream of fundamentalist Islam — not poverty, not “frustration,” and certainly not Israel.

Wondering about the implications of the underwear bomber…

After Richard Reid tried to blow up a plane with his shoe, we all had to take off our shoes before going on a plane. After the plot about bombs in baby bottles was uncovered, we couldn’t bring liquids on board.

So we wonder, now that Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up a plane with explosives in his skivvies, will we have to take our underwear off before getting on a plane?

Seattle gunman found guilty

December 15, 2009

JTA reports that the man who killed a woman and injured six others when he opened fire at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle building in July 2006 has been found guilty of murder in his second trial:

A jury found Naveed Haq, 34, guilty on all eight counts against him. Haq, of Pasco, Wash., will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Following nearly two months of testimony, the jury agreed with the prosecution that Haq knew full well what he was doing when he wounded six women, killing one, at the federation building 2 1/2 years ago.

Haq suffers from a bipolar disorder and his defense claimed he could not understand his actions.

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