How Was the Jihadi Pilot Cleared to Fly?
It has been 25 years since 19 Muslims hijacked planes and flew them into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, while courageous passengers thwarted their attempt to hit a third target in Washington, D.C. You’d think that since then, sensible measures would have been instituted to prevent that kind of jihad attack from happening again.
Airlines might think twice, for example, about employing pilots who hold to the same ideology as the 9/11 hijackers, for there is no way to tell if that ideology might lead them once again to attempt mass murder in the skies in order to soothe the heart of their bloodthirsty god. But of course, no airline did anything to prevent Muslims from becoming pilots, or to try to screen the Muslims they hired for jihadi sentiments, for we were all assured that Islam was a religion of peace, and that the 9/11 attackers were part of a tiny minority of extremists who have misunderstood and misapplied the peaceful teachings of their religion.
We have also been warned that any recognition of the falsity of the religion of peace narrative, and honest explication of the motivating ideology behind jihad terror, constitutes an “Islamophobia” that is unacceptable in decent society, and will get you fired, deplatformed, denounced, maligned, and ostracized. So there are Muslim pilots and other airline workers are common all over the U.S. and Europe, and everyone is too blissfully free from irrational and ugly bigotry and prejudice to utter a single dissenting word.
In North America and Europe, however, the political and media elites who level the charges of “bigotry” and “Islamophobia” don’t know anything about Islam, and don’t know that they don’t know, and so they think that they’re being enlightened, broad-minded, and forward-thinking when they hire Muslims to do aircraft maintenance and excoriate anyone who dares to object.
In Muslim countries, however, the authorities know better. No one can grow up in Riyadh or Islamabad or Tehran without knowing at least the basic tenets of Islam. Even in Dubai, which as part of the United Arab Emirates is party to the Abraham Accords and thus has aroused the ire of Muslim hardliners by entering into an agreement with the hated Jewish state, one would be hard-pressed to find an educated person who didn’t know what Islam was all about, including the violent and supremacist teachings that Western non-Muslim politicians are certain do not exist.
And that makes the story of the attempted jihad hijacking of a Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv all the more curious. The Daily Mail reported Thursday that “Israel is probing how a religious extremist from Oman who stabbed his co-pilot during a hijacking described as ‘Israel’s 9/11’ was cleared to fly.”
It’s a good question: How did someone who was a known jihadi get a job flying passenger planes, and even worse, land an assignment to help fly a plane full of Israelis into Israel? Also, “a fellow pilot has also now claimed the assailant – who is believed to be an Omani national – was a religious extremist.”
Israeli news anchor Yosef Yisrael “described how he spoke to a colleague of the attacker, who wishes to remain anonymous. In a translated version, Mr Yisrael reads out how the violent pilot ‘was someone characterised by very strange behaviour, especially around religious observances that were out of step with his surroundings [at Flydubai]. For instance, he used to pray a lot, and would not shake hands with women.’”
Yisrael added that his source for all this “expressed contrition” over the fact that Flydubai had “betrayed Israel.” The source said: “There is no other way to put it, we hired the services of a terrorist and nearly caused the deaths of 180 people. Usually only Emiratis fly to Israel. It is not clear how he got on this flight.”
Actually, it’s quite clear, at least in broad outline. This could simply have been a disastrous mistake, or a series of disastrous mistakes, but it’s much more likely that someone at Flydubai was sympathetic to the jihad against Israel and wanted to see this Omani jihadi take down a plane full of Israelis. The UAE may be party to the Abraham Accords, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the country, or in Dubai in particular, is a “moderate.” In fact, those fabled Muslims who abhor jihad violence are thinner on the ground than Western authorities would like to believe.
AUTHOR
Robert Spencer
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