When my family entered the El Al terminal at Newark Airport, we were met by someone who asked where we came from and where were going. When we got into the terminal and on the line to check in, an El Al employee asked my 12 year old son (out of my ear’s range) why we were going to Israel. He asked if we were Jewish and when my son answered yes, so followed up by asking the name of our Synagogue and our Rabbi’s name. But while he was asking questions I could feel his eyes gauging my reaction to our kid’s interrogation. The “interrogation” took no longer than thirty seconds. When he was done with my son, he came to me and asked the same questions (plus the typical who packed your luggage-type queries) once again gauging my reaction very closely.
Like the Mossad, tank drivers, and air force pilots, Israeli airport security have that super hero, no-nonsense, get to the point directness and efficiency. “Who packed your bags?” “What was your bar mitzah portion?” “Why are you even here visiting?” This quick-fire interrogation was not bothersome but reassuring. We got the feeling that we were dealing with people who knew what they were doing.
Via
Related – “The Nation magazine, a liberal publication that typically opposed George W. Bush’s NSA snooping on our phone calls, has a new article attacking those who oppose Barack Obama’s TSA snooping around our boxer briefs.”
The TSA paradigm is akin to boarding flights at random until you arrive at your intended destination.
One individual in our party returning to Canada via Detroit airport was full body scanned in Florida on Monday.
Canada and the United States would be well advised to adopt the Israeli method of pre flight interrogation.
I had picked out the error in the percentage cited, but the point that among the world’s Christian, Muslim and other states, Israel is the only Jewish state is still valid. A brilliant piece.
Sorry. I was trying to respond to a different topic but somehow ended up here.
Problem being there aren’t 5 people in the TSA who are smart enough or have enough common sense to conduct this kind of security.
My wife and I had a similar experience several years ago leaving London. The young lady who checked our carryons asked a whole series of questions while she carefully checked the contents. She looked at everything while keeping up this stream of seemingly innocuous questions. When she was done she knew how long we had been in London, where we stayed, what landmarks we had visited and how we liked our visit. Very professional.
Why would we attempt to streamline things at the airport when the whole objective in the first place for the terrorists is to disrupt commerce and our way of life. For those that think America is culpable for the woes of the world, that are in the government, it would be counter productive not to terrorize airline passengers.
Indy’s right; Jeff Dunetz is writing on the assumption that the U.S. authorities are trying to catch terrorists and just happen to be going about it inefficiently. They’re not that dumb.
And that is why the Jews are the chosen people. They do not disappoint.
I’m not sure, I have any brilliant solutions, except the obvious…..Isreali methods work in a threat environment well beyond the USA’s or Canada’s.
Isreal is territorially a small nation which strategically and tactically a mixed blessing with advantages and disadvantages.
Isreal survives for the most part on attitude. It’s political landscape is fractuous and devisive and not monolithic…..but in crisis is united….by the survival instinct.
For the US to adopt Isreali methods successfully major doctrine changes are needed….well beyond profiling. Sadly the principles of meritocracy that were the SOP of the US after the Revolution has deteriorated. This goes far, far beyond afirmative action.
An Isreali helo pilot is not some guy who washed out of jet school but rather because he is the best helo pilot.
Isreali society harbours the same treacherous lefty elements as us but somehow has security/military personel who are competant, engaged and motivated without fanatical, suicidal desperation.
IMHO the US and Canada have not had such a talent pool for decades…..the lefty march through the institutions has smothered it.
“The Human Factor”. Bang On.
And ignoring that factor is why intelligence people missed 9/11 in the first place, screwed up on Iraq’s WMD’s, never caught Bin Ladin, etc., etc.
The U.S. became too lazy relying on hi-tech fixes for understanding human behaviour, and now combined with Left political corrections it borders on madness.
Hi-tech is also why there has been so much voter ballot discrepency in last couple U.S. elections. We can never really be sure if either Bush OR Obama — the two worst U.S. Presidents in history — were ever really legitmately elected.
Does anyone remember the 2002 terrorist incident at Los Angeles Intl Airport?
An Egyptian opened fire at an El Al terminal killing two, wounding three, before an alert, well-trained El Al security agent, himself stabbed by the terrorist, shot and killed him.
I’d guess that if this had been at any other airlines terminal, anywhere in N. America or Europe, the body count would have been much higher before the swine was stopped.
The tinyurl is: tinyurl.com/2e3s2pp
Clearly the agents at the El Al terminal at Newark Airport are ‘profiling’ passengers and doing so within the USA.
Where is the outrage of the usual progressive moonbats, CAIR, ACLU, etc?
Anyway EL Al is doing the job the TSA doesn’t want to do. Degrading of American citizens using physical and psychological warfare is now the job of the TSA as mandated by the Alinskyites in the White House.
The human factor indeed – going through the airport in Florence last January my wife and I were
carefully looked over, separately, by two old Italian cops. They didn’t even ask much.
We had no trouble, and went through the metal detector without problem;
but the fellow ahead of us, an aged hippy-type, was being pretty much undressed
in the detector. I was much more confident in the Italian cops than I was by the usual nonsense we then went through at Frankfurt.
Not only is the TSA totally incompetent at actually finding terrorists, but it now wants anyone who objects to the airport security theater to be investigated as a “domestic extremist”. (http://homelandsecurityus.com/archives/4249).
The moronic US approach comes from the same thinking that wants to ban firearms from everyone instead of dealing with the small fraction of criminals that misuse them or idiotic laws that prevent people from owning chemical glassware because it can potentially be used to make illegal drugs. It is focused on irrelevant things instead of problem people.
Someone who is ready to blow themselves and a large number of people up likely glaringly sticks out when the right behavioral tests are employed. Those are the people one doesn’t want on planes and I can think of hundreds of undetectable ways of stashing bombs that would sail through the security theater at airports — that is if I didn’t plan on surviving the flight.
I suspect that the totalitarian statist presence at airports is to get people used to blatant violations of their constitutional rights so that the US government will have an easier time of imposing martial law in the future. I remember when we used to point the the USSR internal passports required for travel as an example of how a totalitarian state differs from a free one. Now, before boarding an aircrat people are asked to show their passports. I’ve mentioned the totalitarian state aspect of this to the robots that ask for passports but they seem to be clueless. I show my FAC when I can’t get away with my hospital ID.
Now I can add “domestic extremist” to my CV. I’ll do all I can to destroy the security theater at airports which is being used to implement a totalitarian state.
*
“The “interrogation” took no longer than thirty seconds.”
or… like the current administration… you can simply continue
to grope everyone from toddlers to 80 year-old nuns.
*
The airport frenzy is just a distraction to draw attention away from the fact that a very sinister nationwide public security organization is being quickly built up in the USA under Obama. When I see extreme leftist “civil rights” activists praising and defending the present outrageous and futile security procedures of the TSA, it means the fix is in and the party line is in effect. The gropers and voyeurs are just useless front line pawns but their bosses up the line represent a great danger to freedom.
If only we could have an El Al terminal at all airports. Sigh.
When Bush put the ‘Patriot Act’ into effect, and authorized wire tapping etc, the left went hysterical with rage.
But they are silent on Obama’s open declaration of war – against the American people.
These TSA ‘view-and-grope’ tactics are based on an assumption that ALL Americans are potential terrorists. This is part of Obama and the left’s basic anti-Americanism. And part of Obama’s method of dealing with terrorists – which is, as always with Obama, within the world of words, and so, he’ll redefine them as ‘minor aberrations’ and ‘man-caused disasters’.
Note that the selection of someone for these special procedures is ‘random’. That is utterly and totally senseless. Is terrorism to be caught by using a random selection of passengers, or by keeping an eye out, as does El Al, for a particular identity profile and watch for the ‘odd behaviour’ and then examine that particular individual.
Interesting also that CAIR and other Islamic groups are insisting that ‘their people’ be excluded from these scans and searches for ‘religious reasons’. But ‘their people’ are the only ones blowing up planes and buildings.
Those scanners and sexual molestation pat downs are not designed to stop Islamic terrorists, if it were so they would not of excluded Muslim women from the above. Obama is using his office to terrorize the flying public and in the end another civil right will have been trampled by the leftards in the name of security. That last three Muslim bombers were noticed and detained by passengers not the TSA, if they really wanted to stop Muslim terrorists they would of designed a policy that would target them and not non-Muslims who are NOT the ones planting bombs on their persons.
ET those official Muslim organizations have been granted the Official Supremacists religion in the US, there’s not a chance in hell some dude dressed in desert gear or a Muslimia will be subjected to the sexual molestations or radiation.
Perhaps the methods El Al uses would have a better chance of being implemented in the USA and Canada if the terms such as profiling, Jews, Israel, El Al, were not mentioned. You know how the politically correct lefties shudder when they hear those words. Any suggestions for replacement terminology?
As with most things of consequence for leftards, what is racist for right-wingers is legitimate for progressives. Profiling is evil if it is done to a specific group that, by fluke of anomalous statistics, has apparently been responsible for at least 90% of anything that reasonable people would call terrorism. But, progressives teach us that it is quite proper to profile all white males between 15 and 80 as likely perpetrators of violence against women. To profile as misogynists the folks who give us institutionalized wife beatings and honour killings on a regular basis is clearly racist. It turns out for our progressive betters, wife beating and honour killings are not crimes but rather a nuanced cultural quirk that only progressives have the intelligence to understand and put into the proper relativist context. All white Christian evangelists, female and male, old and young can be profiled as ignorant knuckle dragging red-necks. Black male Christians evangelists such as the most reverend Jeremiah Wright who used the lord’s name in vain in condemning the United States is of course a perfectly acceptable visionary or, at worst, misunderstood. A Black female parliamentarian such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali who expressed umbrage with female genital mutilation and other forms of female degradation was branded as hateful by the left because it is her contention that a certain religion has a number of flaws. The fact that she falsified documents to avoid an arranged marriage makes her the “bad guy”. The male person of a culturally nuanced persuasion who arranged the “female as property” marriage is not criticized by leftards who see ironically themselves as the champion of women’s causes. I will be interested to see how our hypocritical leftards friends get their heads around the legality of having four wives after the Supreme Court of Canada ultimately rules on the polygamy case currently being heard in British Columbia.
“We got the feeling that we were dealing with people who knew what they were doing.”
Yup, those days are gone fer sher…..
Perhaps this incessant and unnecessary bum-grabbing is what it takes for the public to really see how futile the milquetoast efforts of airport officials have been. As I’ve said before, we profile for any number of reasons. Ask someone who a serial killer is likely to be and you’ll get some formulaic response. Examine the major incidents involving air travel from September 11th to now. Who have the perpetrators been? Not Lutherans.
It’s just common sense to examine the people you put in a tin can thirty thousand feet in the air.
ET said: “Is terrorism to be caught by using a random selection of passengers, or by keeping an eye out, as does El Al,”
Well, recent history has shown the answer to be the latter. The key to security in my view, along with profiling is consumer education. If passengers themselves were educated and trained to see the signals themselves, more of these plans will be thwarted. But, as I have mused about here before, the security experts (ahem) will assure you that nobody can keep us safe but them. I’ve also suggested that mandatory random seating would be an effective way to sabotage large and elaborate plans like seen on 9/11. One other thing would help, and that would be having a nation of men that can handle themselves physically when it’s necessary; and, having a population with the moral conviction and courage to recognize and act when the situation arises.
I wonder what would happen if a bunch of lonely men started going through screening dressed as women in an effort to get their junk fondled by the female TSA pervs?
Osumashi whilst I agree with you it isn’t the Lutherans who are hell bent on genocide. It can be increasingly difficult to determine who is a “wrong un”
This dipstick for example doesn’t stand out as your typical mad mullah.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7859887.stm
I think there is also a cultural element involved with Israeli security. I have dealt with hundreds of Israelis over the years in my previous occupation and nearly every one has an “in your face” attitude. It probably stems from a siege mentality, being surrounded by people who want to wipe you out is bound to make you somewhat confrontational.
Let’s look at it this way: the US Government has
finally found something it is good at:
sexual molestation, sexual harassment, and child molestation!
Be impressed!
If they were so concerned about national security they would send the 50,000 troops guarding the border between North and South Korea to the Mexican border!
More American civilians have died, been raped, or kidnapped due to the Mexican invasion of America than any other conflict in its history.
Any Muslim terrorist group up to platoon size could walk across that border any day or night of the week and set up small insurgent bases around the country.
Never believe that airport TSA workers stripping you down and feeling you up has anything to do with your protection. It’s about control and manipulation by an aggressive government against its own citizenry.
American and the greater world needs to be very worried when the land of the free and brave cattle cars it’s law-abiding citizens like this, while allowing criminals to run amok in the streets.
Another reason the US will not adopt Israeli style airport security, is because they could never generate the required staffing IQ from their $10.00/ hour gene pool.
But – but – but since they’ve started these security procedures, not a single plane has been blown up by a nun or a 3 year old! THE SYSTEM’S WORKING!!!!
This is nothing but training for the TSA agents before they become Homeland Security agents and then the real interrogations can begin. This is only a test run of how to manage large numbers of people and get the sheeple used to being manhandled outside of their constitutional rights and willingly doing so.
Train up a child in the way he should go…the American citizenry are but children and don’t know their rights. They deserve what they are getting.
““What was your bar mitzah portion?”
Ummm, a huge chunk of cheese knishe and a pile of incredible lox?
…man, I’d be so screwed! 😉
I suspect the CIA is recalling one of their ME agents to fly back to the US with a fake bomb in his crotch then Obama can prance before the MSM and giggle see my new security measures work. Gawd will we ever admit that treating non-Muslim extremists like criminals is not the solution in fact it’s turning us all into anarchists.