I am not ethnocentric or xenophobic, and I'm certainly not a racist. Having lived abroad for almost half of my adulthood I have known a lot of people from other cultures and countries. If I were to list the top 20 people I have known over the years who I like and trust the most, more than half would hold citizenship from another country, and many would have have darker colored skin.
If you look at the people who have been responsible for most of the bombings over the last 25 years, either of airliners or as suicide bombers, you see certain things. What I am about to say is not racism or intolerance; it is simply realism. Facing up to the truth.
----- Most of them were religious fanatics of one denomination or another.
----- Very few of these people are over 45 years old. Most are 30 or younger.
----- Most have dark colored skin.
----- A significant number are named Abdul or Mohamed.
Some may call this a form of racism called racial profiling. I simply call it the profiling of murderers. It is unproductive and rude, and a horrific waste of time and money, to force a courteous, 60 year old white haired grandparent to remove his/her shoes and undergo rigorous procedures like being patted down. This is what happened to me just a few weeks ago on a domestic flight when I few from El Paso, Texas in America to Amarillo, Texas. This farce pretends that nothing is known about terrorism, and that elderly Americans are as much at risk of committing an act of terrorism as a young, fanatically religious Muslim is.
The rules are currently being modified so that no one can get out of their seat during the last hour of a flight. What about all those older folks who have to pee frequently? An hour is a long time for me and many others.
The 20 something Nigerian who tried to blow up the airliner a couple of days ago not only fit the profile I have identified, he was so weird and screwed up that his own father had recently warned the American authorities about him. These incompetent American “security” jerks didn't think that the opinion of his own father was adequate cause to put his name on the database list where the security folks at the Amsterdam airport would have been warned about this young man which might have caused them to look a little closer at him.
One time I flew out of Lod airport in Israel. The security people in Israel weren't out of work minimum wage people who had been given a bit of training. They were soldiers from the Israeli military. They carried at the ready loaded sub-machine guns. Every single passenger, fully 100%, was given a thorough pat down. Then all of their luggage, both hand bags and checked bags, were completely unpacked and inspected – right there in public by the security people with you standing there watching and answering any questions they had. These people even removed the batteries from my Sony Walkman. They were professional. They were not abusive, but they were were absolutely no-nonsense. You didn't joke around with these folks. When soldiers are standing there with loaded weapons drawn, and they are not smiling, you take the whole event a little more seriously.
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