Friday, December 4, 2009
Debbie Schlussel has two must-reads concerning another obvious terror dry run on an American flight: Another Muslim Hijacking Dry Run?: If True, Tedd Petruna's My New Hero; UPDATE: CONFIRMED and Another Passenger Confirms AirTran Flt. 297 Dry Run.
Scary stuff, folks, on a number of levels, and you can thank groups like CAIR and the Muslim American Society for working one angle -- using the courts to reinforce our PC fears of giving offense even at the expense of our lives -- while guys like these passengers work the other angle of doing the actual dirty work.
Update: Here is a response from the airline: AirTran responds to passenger's terrorism email. This whole story needs a lot more data and testimony.
Update2 12/5: The story is going farther into the "NOT a terror dry-run" category. Here is the Snopes page. [h/t: Seva]
Nappy saw this on Hot Air and was tempted to tekk Sol about it -- Nappy just loves hat-tips even when amanuensis gets the recognition -- but on reading the comments, it becomes clear that the first-hand reports don't make any sense, and some of the reported facts conflict with the records of that flight. Nappy concurs with the commenters who concluded the story is a hoax.
Sol's right: it's scary stuff. CAIR and MAS are enablers, and Political Correctness* will be the death of us. To quote Porky Pig, "Be afwaid. Be vewy afwaid." But, lets keep our wits about us and not get suckered by merry pranksters putting out false stories to raise our consciousness. In the end, these hoaxes do more harm than good. Means do not justify ends.
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* PJTV has put up a pay wall for this video. A lot of the material in it is cribbed from this program (in 3 parts) on You Tube: The History of Political Correctness. (Whittle's rant on that Afterburner segment is great; watch it if you can. Whittle gives credit where credit is due and links to this more expansive treatment on YouTube.)
I think it's a very confused/confusing story. I think the original passenger story may be exaggerated, and he did say some things he couldn't have known, otoh, some of the airline's answers aren't 100% satisfying and are a bit legalistic as well. More data and more testimonies are needed.
I missed the Hot Air thread. Got a link? I don't see it.
Snopes is garbage and should not be used for an update. They are soft on Muslims to the extreme. One would think that a site supposedly devoted to shattering internet hoaxes would have a staff and a bunch of equipment, instead, Snopes is just the comments of a husband and wife Leftwing team. Debbie Schlussel points out that they've gotten stories wrong, lied, and slant to the Left.
Oh, dear me. You've got Nappy all confused -- even more than usual. (It's not hard to do that; it's like shooting fish in a barrel, to use a venerable metaphor that never made any sense to poor, old Nappy.)
Nappy thought it was on Hot Air but can't find that post and comment thread. Nor on Atlas Shrugs. It was last week, on a kiosk computer at a public library, so browser history isn't available to clear it up.
On a lark, Nappy clicked on Sol's link to Debbie Schlussel, and Bingo. That's the post and comment thread. Nappy now recalls having looked up something related to Dearbornistan before grazing Hot Air, so there's the source of confusion. The post has been updated a couple more times in the interim and there are now a lot more comments. (Debbie's site mixes up what "Newer" and "Older" mean when reviewing comments.) Bottom line: Sol and Nappy saw the same post and drew different conclusions.
It's clear that Tedd Petruna embellished his story quite a bit. Kicking it up a couple of notches makes for a great headline and a better story. The reality is so much less exciting: no physical altercations, no porn, a flight that was delayed, not canceled, no sassing the stew as an infidel dog, etc. Petruna claimed to be reporting what factually happened, but he took quite a few liberties that would be OK if he's been writing the screenplay for a script for a B-movie or a TV drama.
Nappy stands by the statement that juicing it up is not a good thing. Just as we decry the global warming alarmists for their distortions, Nappy thinks we should play it straight and stick to the facts.