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Posted on 09/21/2001 7:31:33 PM PDT by Chuckmorse

Is Boston a City of Sissies?

I note with chagrin that two of the passenger planes, hijacked by Islamic terrorists, came out of my hometown of Boston.
The hijacking of the planes, accomplished at the point of a pocketknife, caused the deaths of thousands of innocent people in the worst man caused disaster in American history.
Last weekend, five days after the catastrophe, a pilot on a United Airlines flight told his passengers how to stop a hijacking.
He said:

“If anybody stands up and is trying to take over the plane, stand up together, take whatever you have and throw it at their heads, you have to aim for their faces so they have to defend themselves.”

The pilot went on to suggest that passengers could throw blankets over the hijackers heads, wrestle them to the ground, and hold them until the plane landed.
In response to the pilots comments, the passengers applauded and wept.
The pilot described what would have been a natural response to such a crisis for people properly steeped in even basic notions of self-defense.
Such action would have most likely stopped the hijackers.

It is perhaps no coincidence that the hijackers chose Boston as their point of departure.
The terrorists probably viewed Boston, a sissified center of the liberal eastern seaboard establishment, a city that forgot its revolutionary heritage generations ago, as a point of least resistance.
Note that they didn’t choose a southern or western city to hijack a plane; they probably figured that in that part of the country they would be more likely to encounter people who would instinctively know what to do.

I sadly include myself, a lifelong resident of Boston, as one of the products of this mentality.
I’m afraid that I probably would have sat there like a petrified mouse if I were on that flight.
Like most Bostonians, my father, G-d bless him, never taught me how to defend myself and, as a result, I must admit, I probably couldn’t pick my way out of a wet paper bag if I needed to.
Our society teaches us that the State takes care of defense, and, most Bostonians simply don’t have a clue.
My purpose is not to denigrate the poor passengers on those flights, only to use what happened to them as a wake up call for the rest of us who were lucky enough to survive that day.

An example of a typical liberal Boston attitude toward self-defense was expressed by Rabbi Samuel Chiel, a resident of the cushy Boston suburb of Newton, in an editorial he wrote for Boston's Jewish Advocate entitled "Looking for a Few Good Resorts (8/99)."
Chiel wrote that he was shocked to encounter an organization called "Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership."
He stated, with incredulity, that "Apparently, there are those (and Jews, yet) who think that guns mean safety.”

Chiel was indignant over a statement by a David Nathanson, a visitor at the resort in question, a resort which teaches self-defense.
Chiel quotes Nathanson as saying regarding the resort and JPFO: “What we share is a belief that an armed society is a safe society.”
Chiel responds "All of these years I have thought that a safe society is one where people are concerned for each other and willing to work together to make their community a better place for all who live there".

Thundering with indignation, Chiel ends the article with a sanctimonious statement, typical for his ilk: “I, for one, would rather spend my winters in a place where the community works to eliminate all guns except those belonging to the police."
Too bad so many Bostonians are imbued with the philosophy of the Chiels of this world.
It grieves me to point out that attitudes like those of Rabbi Chiel, and others in positions of influence and responsibility, lead to the phenomena of an immobilized planeload of able-bodied adults gliding to their deaths at the point of papercutters.

Chuck Morse www.chuckmorse.com

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