Finally Getting Serious about Identifying Islamists?
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the first of
your friends to like this.
After the jihadi attacks in Paris in January and November 2015, the
French intelligence agency Direction générale de la sécurité
intérieure (DGSI, General Directorate for Internal Security) began to
scrutinize personnel at the city's airports.
As Adam Sage reports for the Times of London
in "Islamists
defy checks to work at Paris airport," DGSI then began doing
what is normally unheard of: Looking intently at Muslims among the 82,000
employees at Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport to see who they are, what
they believe. Specifically, it
was ordered to check all Muslims with airside security passes in
airports. Radicals were to be weeded out. More than 60 passes were
withdrawn for "inappropriate behaviour", such as a refusal to
trim a beard or to shake hands with female colleagues. Some employees had
their passes withdrawn for praying in Salafist mosques, others because a
copy of the Koran was found in their lockers. Some were said to have
expressed support for the jihadists who killed 130 people in Paris six
months ago.
|
Charles de Gaulle
airport, site of 82,000 employees.
|
The apparent sabotage of an EgyptAir flight that left Paris for Cairo
on May 19 suggests that even these measures did not suffice. In the words
of Eric Denécé of the Centre Français de Recherche sur le Renseignement
(CF2R, French Center for Intelligence Research): "The problem is not
resolved. Radical Islamists still worked at the airport, not necessarily
as baggage handlers but at all levels."
Comments:
(1) It's pretty remarkable that a long beard, not shaking hands with a
woman, praying in the wrong mosque, owning a copy of the Koran, or
supporting ISIS already can get a person fired.
(2) As yet more intrusive measures to ferret out Islamists seem to be
in the works, I offer my services: Should the authorities need help
figuring out further signs as to who might be a sleeper agent, I provide
some clues here.
And if they need questions to ask to probe attitudes, I offer those here
and here.
(3) "Denial is likely to continue until the price gets too
steep," I wrote in 2013. "At that point, worries about Muslim
sensibilities and fear of being called an 'Islamophobe' will fade into
irrelevance, replaced by a single-minded determination to protect
lives." Perhaps, at Parisian airports anyway, that moment has been
reached. (May 23, 2016)
This
text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an
integral whole with complete and accurate information provided about its
author, date, place of publication, and original URL.
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment