It Isn't Racist to Not Want to Die

 Facts don’t have to be warm and friendly to keep you alive.

One of science's biggest challenges is separating an experiment from its surroundings. When measuring the energy of a chemical reaction, one has to completely isolate the experiment from its surroundings. Doing so might only require running the reaction in a thick container of Styrofoam so that no energy comes into or goes out of the reaction chamber. A very expensive accelerator (CERN) in Europe had electrical noise, and they couldn’t understand why. For a prize of a bottle of champagne, they challenged their scientists to find a solution. A fellow looked at a local train schedule and determined that a train that ran near the facility perfectly accounted for the timing of the unwanted noise.

With our Flydubai plane, we have a perfectly isolated “community”. The numbers keep changing, but apparently there were around 180 people on the plane. Most were Israelis, which no doubt includes Jews, Arab Muslims and Arab Christians. Few Emiratis visit Israel, but we’ll assume that cabin crew and security included some UAE citizens. There were the two ostensibly white Christian backup pilots who landed the plane. All of the people listed above wanted to live. Each expected to arrive in Tel Aviv and continue with his or her life. And then there was the Omani Muslim pilot. As President Trump mentioned, we still don’t know if he was a terrorist or a “whack job”. If he was a terrorist, and that’s where I would place my bet, then we have the case of one guy who wanted to die and take with him 179 other people who wanted to live. And this is the problem of Islam in the West.

An interesting clause in the Abraham Accords is that any pilots flying between Israel and other countries must come from states that recognize both Israel and the Arab country source/destination. By those rules, the Omani pilot should have been disqualified from being in the right seat of the 737 Max. Why was he there? This question will have to be answered by UAE officials as part of their investigation. The reason why that stipulation is in the agreement is obvious: an Iraqi-born pilot or similar might have a hankering to kill 200 Jews and get his 72 virgins. The US does not need 150 million jihadi Muslims to kiss the country goodbye. Rather, a relatively small number of determined terrorists with Muslim Brotherhood financing and backing could cause complete mayhem and destruction of people, property, and economic well-being. Nineteen hijackers killed 3,000 Americans, shut down the stock market for days, ended flights into and out of the US for weeks, and completely changed our lives (TSA, etc.).

One can ignore this reality. That’s what Jews in southern Israel did. They gave Gazans jobs and took sick Gazans to Israeli hospitals. They were murdered like everybody else. Some think that by being nice and showing one’s good side, he will convince Muslims to like them and not kill them. Wrong! And in light of this reality, the West might want to take into consideration a smidgen of “racism” so as not to commit communal suicide.

In our desire to rewrite history, many like to shame or point a finger at the United States of the 1940s when it sent Japanese and other Axis-born immigrants to camps to move them away from the coasts and to keep an eye on them. This program sounds downright racist and bigoted, but if one was alive at the time, he would be the one breaking down doors to get his recently arrived Japanese neighbors onto a train to Montana. Racism is doing something evil to another for no real reason. No blacks in our restaurant! That’s bigotry and hatred. But if there are Muslims who wish to kill Westerners, then Western leaders have every right and even an obligation to protect their citizens. We see in Europe that their leaders don’t care about putting a couple hundred or even thousands of illegal African/Muslim immigrants in a small town, and if women get attacked, so be it. One may be accused of hysteria, but as several Israeli leaders said, they would rather be loathed and alive rather than dead and celebrated.

Islam is not a religion as much as a political movement with religious trappings. One cannot separate the “let’s kill all of the infidels” and violent jihad aspect of Islam from the prayers in mosques and fasting during Ramadan. Muslims in the UAE and, say, Malaysia somehow don’t seem to have the violent streak of those in Gaza and Tehran. Still, it was not that long ago (a decade) when the UAE was financing Hamas, and at this time, Malaysia has no relations with Israel. Claims of Islamophobia and racism are used in order to prevent non-Muslims from protecting themselves from people who, for ideological reasons, want to kill them.

The Indian-born pilot did not have any interest in killing the 179 souls under his command. The Air France pilot of the plane hijacked to Uganda refused to leave with the remaining non-Jewish passengers as he told the hijackers that he was responsible for his Jewish passengers and would not leave without them. He was rescued along with the others when Yoni Netanyahu led forces into Uganda to free those still held hostage.

In England, one sees violence and actual terror performed by recent Islamic arrivals, second- and third-generation Muslims as well as converts to Islam. The West doesn’t understand what kind of time bomb it has willingly and cluelessly brought into its midst. Just as nobody from circa 1990 United States thought much of 19 Muslims taking flight lessons at various US flight schools, today’s leaders aren’t thinking much of thousands and thousands of young, military-aged Muslim men coming to their shores. I don’t know what happened near the RAF base with the vans and five guys who were arrested. Was it a terror plot? Were they Muslims? Why were they released to house arrest? For all of the information at our fingertips, we don’t know everything. Let’s say that the Omani pilot says that Iran sent him, but the Saudis are terrified of renewed fighting. They won’t let Israel know the truth and will claim that the pilot was a kook and nothing more.

It’s not racist to not want to die. It’s not Islamophobic to note, as a Kuwaiti editor once did: not all Muslims are terrorists, while all terrorists seem to be Muslims. I asked a rabbi once about how one should look at and treat Muslims in Israel. He told me a story of a friend whose car broke down near an Arab town in the “West Bank”. As he sat there, he saw locals approaching and figured that the road would soon be named in memoriam after him. The guys approached and asked if they could help. The rabbi concluded that it’s not such a simple equation. I know of Arab Muslim doctors who have thrown themselves into saving Jewish Israeli patients. That said, one does not have to bury his head in the sand or go DEI and ignore the facts that A) some percentage of Muslims are into violent jihad against “infidels” and B) the remaining Muslim community is not doing anything about them. When some fake ultraorthodox Jews marched with Iran, Belgian Jewish schools threw their kids out of their institutions. Get out and stay out.

The West is either at a crossroads or lost. Europe doesn’t have the moral fortitude to recognize its destruction and right the ship. The US has the time and leadership to change things. But change must come now.