Posted on 07/10/2002 12:54:05 PM PDT by Bryan
I'm a dead white male, as you can tell from the above picture. Suppose on Martin Luther King Day I went to the offices of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and shot the receptionists. How many nano-seconds do you think it would take before the attack was being characterized as racially motivated? Your top Olympic hotshot could ingest every steroid on the planet and he couldn't beat that time.
Suppose it was Judy Garland's birthday and I went to my local gay bathhouse and opened fire on the fetching young men handing out the towels. How many minutes would tick by before the word "homophobia" was heard? Or suppose it was the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, and me and my semi-automatic swung by the abortion clinic?
Well, you get the idea. On the Fourth of July (hint) a guy went to the airport in Los Angeles, sauntered up to the ticket counter of El Al (hint) and fatally shot two people and wounded three. How many folks hearing the news on a quickie radio update honestly expected it to be anyone other than a Muslim male of Middle Eastern origin? Obviously, Underperformin' Norman Mineta, the scrupulously sensitivity-trained U.S. Transportation Secretary, would have been wary of jumping to conclusions. Were he running the LAPD, he'd have pulled in a couple of elderly nuns and Kelli-Sue, a trainee hairdresser from Des Moines.
But, fortunately for the final death toll, El Al has its own security and so the suspect, after firing 10 rounds, was himself killed. And whaddaya know? He wasn't an elderly nun but a 41-year-old Egyptian male! His name wasn't Kellie-Sue, it was Hesham Mohamed Hadayet!
This stunning development seems to have completely disoriented the FBI. I quote from The New York Times headline: "Officials Puzzled About Motive Of Airport Gunman." Hmm. Egyptian Muslim kills Jews on American national holiday. Best not to jump to conclusions. Denial really is a river in Egypt. "It appears he went there with the intention of killing people," said Richard Garcia, the Bureau's agent in charge. "Why he did that we are still trying to determine."
CNN and The Associated Press all but stampeded to report a "witness" who described the shooter as a fat white guy in a ponytail who kept yelling "Artie took my job." But, alas, this promising account proved to be a prank. Saudi Arabia's popular Arab News suggested that Mr. Hadayet had made the mistake of doing business with El Al and that "the Israeli airline had been late in paying for two limousine rentals from the Egyptian immigrant's company." If a couple of late cheques were a motive for murder, Izzy's and Conrad's heads would now be stuffed and mounted in my trophy room. But, sadly, this cautionary tale about the Jew bloodsucker's commercial wiles proved also to be false.
That left the police with no leads. Nothing to go on. The trail's stone cold. All the FBI has is an Egyptian male, who'd complained to his apartment managers after his neighbours post-9/11 began displaying the American flag; who'd posted a banner saying "READ KORAN" on his own front door; who told his employees that he hated Israel, that the two biggest drug dealers in New York were Israelis, and that Israel was trying to wipe out the Egyptian population by flooding the country with AIDS-infected Jewess prostitutes.
Could even the most expert psychological profiler make sense of such confusing and contradictory signs? Beats me, Sherlock. But, as Agent Garcia says, there's no indication of "anti-Israel views or any other type of racial views." Orange County's Muslim Public Affairs Council has praised Agent Garcia for his exceptionally advanced levels of sensitivity. Any moment now, they'll be demanding to know why Governor Gray Davis has failed to visit a mosque to reassure Muslims.
-snip-
(Mark Steyn in the British National Post, July 9, 2002)
The case of Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, my dear Watson, is one of those detective stories whose solution is obvious to any newspaper reader but which baffles the authorities by its mysterious complexity. Let us simply list the clues:
1. He attacked the El Al airline at Los Angeles airport and killed two Jews. There are at least 20 airlines using LAX. So if this was a random attack — an enraged response, say, to bad airline food over the years — the odds were at least 20-to-1 against his targeting El Al. If, however, he consciously selected El Al for attack — which seems much more likely — then it is reasonable to conclude that he did so because El Al is the Israeli national airline and its officials and passengers were likely to be Israelis and/or Jews.
2. He was heavily armed but had no airline ticket or passenger pick-up that day. In other words, he went to LAX to murder people and not for some legitimate purpose.
3. He was an educated middle-class Egyptian citizen with family connections to people in the national establishment. If the FBI were still allowed to profile, it would have noticed that he fit the profile of the Sept. 11 hijackers with almost embarrassing exactitude.
4. His car bore the bumper-sticker "Read the Koran." Nothing wrong with that, of course. In the absence of other evidence it would suggest merely that he was a pious Muslim. But since ordinarily pious Muslims do not think it right to murder complete strangers, we may legitimately infer that he was one of that extreme "Islamist" faction known as al-Qaida that believes it entirely permissible, even mandatory, to kill Israelis, Jews and their friends and supporters, such as Americans.
5. His neighbors and employees testify that he frequently denounced Israel, U.S. support for Israel, and — despite his own relative rise to prosperity as a limousine business owner — American discrimination against Arabs and Muslims.
6. And the final conclusive piece of evidence that he was a terrorist: He had once been slated for deportation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service but the INS changed its mind and allowed him to stay in the United States.
Boom boom, as they say on the comedy shows.
What these clues establish, of course, is merely that Hadayet was a terrorist who set out to murder innocent bystanders for political motives. There is less evidence as yet that he was acting on the actual instructions of al-Qaida, or Egyptian Jihad, or any other organized terrorist group.
Some Middle Eastern sources, both Arab and Israeli, claiming counterintelligence sources, suggest that he was a "sleeper" for Egyptian Jihad and that he had twice met Osama bin Laden's deputy in California in 1995 and 1998. According to this theory, he set off to LAX on July 4 because his terrorist godfathers wanted a terrorist outrage on America's national day.
That is perfectly plausible. It is also possible, however, that he was a terrorist sympathizer who quietly seethed with hatred for Israel and the United States and sympathy for bin Laden until he decided one day to strike a blow on his own. After all, it required no great ingenuity to guess that an attack July 4 would be especially unsettling to Americans.
We shall discover which version is correct in due course. In either event, Hadayet was a terrorist.
-snip-
(John O'Sullivan in the Chicago Sun-Times, July 9, 2002)
On the 4th of July, an Egyptian immigrant to the United States who believes in wild conspiracy theories about Jews, is known for his great "hate for Israel," and has possible ties to al Qaeda, armed himself to the teeth and assaulted the Israeli airline counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two.
It is obvious why Hesham Mohamed Ali Hadayet targeted Jews in a highly visible place on so prominent a date: to engage in terrorism against Israel.
But one important institution — the U.S. government — claims not to know Hadayet's goals. An FBI spokesman has said that "there's nothing to indicate terrorism." Another FBI official said of Hadayet: "It appears he went there with the intention of killing people. Why he did that we are still trying to determine." Possible causes named include a work dispute and a hate crime.
Sure, law enforcement should not jump to conclusions, but this head-in-the-clouds approach is ridiculous. It also fits a well-established pattern. Consider three cases of terrorism in the New York City area:
Rashid Baz, a Lebanese cab driver with a known hatred for all things Israeli and Jewish, armed himself to the teeth in March 1994 and drove around the city looking for a Jewish target. He found his victims — a van full of Hasidic boys — on the Brooklyn Bridge and fired a hail of bullets against them, killing one boy.
And how did the FBI classify this crime? As "road rage." Only because the murdered boy's mother relentlessly fought this false description did the Bureau finally in 2000 re-classify the murder as "the crimes of a terrorist."
Ali Hasan Abu Kamal, a Palestinian gunman hailing from militant Islamic circles in Florida, took a gun to the top of the Empire State building in February 1997 and shot a tourist there.
His suicide note accused the United States of using Israel as its "instrument" against the Palestinians, but city officials ignored this evidence and instead dismissed Abu Kamal as either "one deranged individual working on his own" (Police Commissioner Howard Safir) or a "man who had many, many enemies in his mind" (Mayor Rudolph Giuliani).
Gamil al-Batouti, an EgyptAir copilot, yelled "I put my faith in God's hands" as he crashed a plane leaving Kennedy airport in October 1999, killing 217. Under Egyptian pressure, the National Transportation Safety Board report shied away from once mentioning Batouti's possible terrorist motives.
And despite all the "world-has-changed" rhetoric following the horrors of last September, Western officialdom continues to pretend terrorism away.
-snip-
(Daniel Pipes in the New York Post, July 9, 2002)
No problem here. Islam is war, murder, rape, oppression, intolerance, enslavement and conquest. From the Qur'an and from the History books, this is aa "religion of piece ... of crap". Blow smoke up someone elses arse, Islam sucks and the World would be far better off if it was gone. It's an insult to human enlightenment and inspiration.
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