CLAIRE BERLINSKI: Airport Security And Common Sense.
What the Israelis do is effective, but it’s not scaleable. Israel is a minuscule country. You could probably fit the whole Zionist Entity inside of Dallas-Ft. Worth airport. (That may even be literally true: I leave it to you to check.) It has exactly one major international airport, which handles maybe ten million passengers a year. In America, you’ve got about two million people flying every single day, 86 airports that carry more than a million passengers per year, and 25 that carry more than ten million–each one, in other words, handling the volume of traffic handled by the entire State of Israel. If you think the lines move quickly in Israel, think again. Implement those kinds of procedures and you’d grind what’s left of the US economy to a halt.
The Israelis aren’t using some racial or religious algorithm to screen passengers. If they were, I wouldn’t get stuck at security at Ben Gurion for hours every time I fly there, would I? I assure you they don’t take a look at my passport and say, “Well, she’s an American, and ‘Berlinski’ sounds kind-of Jewish, so she’s probably fine.” Every single time, they interrogate me for hours.
“Profiling” is a security fantasy, just like “sticking your hands down an elderly woman’s diaper” is a security fantasy–both amount to some kind of neo-pagan pre-flight prayer ritual. What’s rational is competent intelligence work of the kind the FBI actually does pretty well, to judge from the number of terrorist attacks that have been interrupted in recent years. What’s rational are locked and hardened cockpit doors, and making passengers fully aware that if the plane is hijacked, you rise up as one and kill the hijackers. Metal-detector screening–for firearms–is reasonable. Looking for tweezers and liquids is not. Indecent bodily searches are not. Making people take their computers out of their bags is not–that’s an X-ray machine, for goodness’ sake.
Well, the power cables and stuff get in the way, I guess.
Related: UK Terrorists Told: Pretend To Be Gay So You Don’t Get Caught.