Feel Safe Yet?

Feel Safe Yet?

http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/27/feel-safe-yet-2/

Posted by Robert Spencer on Dec 27th, 2010 and filed under FrontPage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of ten books, eleven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran (Regnery), and he is coauthor (with Pamela Geller) of The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (Simon and Schuster).

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Only greasy Islamophobes would object to a hijabbed, observant Muslim TSA worker, right? After all, to object would be to assume that all Muslims are jihad terrorists or jihad terrorist sympathizers, and that is the very definition of “Islamophobia,” now, isn’t it? We should be applauding the prospect of a devout Muslim who has dedicated her time to protecting Americans by working at the TSA, right?

All right. I am sure the TSA employee pictured here is as loyal and patriotic as the day is long. This is the question I have: just imagine the possibility — admittedly wild and remote, virtually inconceivable — that jihadis would want to infiltrate the TSA, so as to place operatives in strategic positions who could then ensure that airport security became lax at the precisely opportune moment. One’s immediate thought would be that they would be dressed in a secular Western style, as the Al-Qaeda playbook directs, and as Muhammad Atta and his fellow jihad hijackers were dressed on September 11, 2001.

However, another goal could be in view as well: the placement of people dressed in “Muslim garb,” as Juan Williams memorably put it, in the TSA forces non-Muslim air passengers to place their safety in the hands of people who clearly hold the same belief-system as did those who made all these security procedures necessary in the first place. Thus we are forced tacitly to acknowledge either that that belief-system had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks — even though the attackers themselves invoked it and only it as their motivation — and that therefore we must do nothing to oppose its spread in the West, or that even if that belief-system did motivate the 9/11 jihad attacks, it is continuing to advance in the West and we can do nothing about it.

The two goals may coalesce: in other words, Islamic jihadists who wished to infiltrate the TSA may decide that a hijabbed TSA worker would be preferable to one in secular dress, as a gesture of Islamic supremacist assertiveness as well as the placement of an agent who could weaken security at the right moment. A hijabbed TSA worker is the personification of a dare: Islamic supremacists are daring the TSA to question her about her belief-system, thereby acknowledging that that belief-system has something to do with terror and violence. The TSA almost certainly did not dare to do so: it is virtually inconceivable that the woman pictured, as well as other hijabbed TSA workers and airport personnel, were ever questioned in any attempt to determine how closely their view coincided with those of Osama bin Laden. To have done so would have been “Islamophobic,” and would have invited protests from the Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).

And so the TSA hires observant Muslims without making any effort at all to determine whether or not they are jihadist infiltrators.Yet on what basis can that possibility be ruled out?

Feel safe yet?

(Photo thanks to Pamela Geller).