<< RESPONSE DISPROPORTIONATE ~ MAIN ~ EXPERTS AGREE >>
REVERSE CALL
British Airways is now offering flights direct from London to London:
A British Airways flight from London to New York turned around mid-flight and returned to London’s Heathrow airport after a mobile phone started ringing, the airline said.
“Flight BA179 has returned to Heathrow as a precautionary measure,” a spokeswoman for BA told AFP.
“A mobile phone was located on board the aircraft which none of the passengers appear to own.”
Get used to it. We’re in for a lot more of this, as Mark Steyn warns:
If you had told an Englishman on Sept. 10, 2001, that within five years all hand luggage would be banned on flights from Britain, he’d have thought you were a kook. If you’d told an Englishwoman that all liquids would be banned except milk for newborn babies that could only be taken on board if the adult accompanying the child drinks from the bottle in front of a security guard, she’d have scoffed and said no one would ever put up with such a ludicrous imposition. But now it’s here. What other changes will the Islamists have wrought in another five years?
Absent a determination to throttle the ideology, we’re about to witness the unraveling of the world.
On related matters, please read Paul Sheehan and Stephen Morris. Especially Stephen Morris.
UPDATE. Read this, too, by Mary Ann Sieghart.
Viz Mark Steyn,
I recall when Congressman Henry Waxman first sought to ban smoking on airplanes. People were told that the smoking ban would be confined to US domestic flights only. Now they’ve succeeded in banning smoking virtually everywhere including outdoors.
My point is: When governments begin banning, there’s no end to it. Someone wrote the other day that soon we’ll only be allowed to fly if we’re sedated with drugs first and naked.
... but hey, let’s not let them change the way we live; we’re all agreed on that, right?
Next there’ll be security guards emptying bottles and tubes of shampoos or toothpaste into vats in the middle of airports, in case they’re really liquid explosives, because, you know, it would be a really safe thing to do, if you really thought they really were explosives and you were surrounded by thousands of travellers.
Oh, that already happened ...
Oh and laughable quote of the week goes to normally sensible George Megalogenis on Sunday’s “Insiders”, commenting on the phenomenon of Western-born Muslim suicide bombers: “This has nothing to do with religion”.
Posted by Bearded Mullah on 2006 08 14 at 02:28 AM • permalinkI responded to Seighart in the Times thus:
Anne Seighart is wrong to suggest that Western foreign policy is the spur of islamic terrorism. This started 1400 years ago, long before there was a USA.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2006 08 14 at 02:52 AM • permalinkI don’t think this incident is part of any pattern or trend. It’s just British Airways being dicks, as usual.
Posted by harry hutton on 2006 08 14 at 03:07 AM • permalink“In this day, when most of us woke up to the knowledge of another foiled plot, we just need the artists to be a window into realities under construction and an antidote to fundamentalism on both sides,” she said.
so, wtf does this dribble mean? unless suicide bombing is now considered an abstract art.
And by Mark Steyn’s definition, I’m a great big fascist pining for the days when there weren’t so many muslims in Australia. Then he would be right.
Is there a more useless collection of people with their heads wedged firmly up their posteriors than our parasitic “Arts community”...
You can definitely put them on the “Part of the Problem” side of the ledger, rather than the “Part of the Solution” side… Apart from being a bunch of insufferable, self righteous twats!!!!
If they were our last hope we might as well run the white flag up the pole now, and save ourselves a whole heap of trouble…
PS to that bunch of numbskulls, its no use talking about lack of progress, liberty or standards of living as drawbacks of radical islam… If you really want to prove to them what a bunch of philistines and barbarians the Taliban and their ilk are, just show them the figures for arts funding/grants under these types of regimes!!!
“In this day, when most of us woke up to the knowledge of another foiled plot, we just need the artists to be a window into realities under construction and an antidote to fundamentalism on both sides,”…
$1000 to the first ‘artist’ to critique Islam. By the way “fundamentalism on both side”?!? Phu-leze let it not mean what I think it is suppose to mean.# Dan Lewis,
I can’t find my broom, can I borrow yours?.Posted by Daniel San on 2006 08 14 at 04:24 AM • permalinkDaza…. Both men wearing balaclavas.
How can they be seen as having middle eastern appearance?But I understand you point. Maybe that is why SMH did not put in that statement? But that assumes someone of intellegence working there. Hmmm!
Posted by The Big Fish on 2006 08 14 at 04:45 AM • permalinkSo far we have two major changes to air travel:
mobiles banned from flights (all upside as far as i can see)
Americans frustrated in their genetic pre disposition to try to get a cubic metre of hand luggage onto every flight they take (once again cant see a down side)
for once the terrorists are value adding as far as i can tell.
Posted by Astonished on 2006 08 14 at 06:01 AM • permalinkNo mobiles, huh. Just think of all that we know, and all that the passengers of flight 93 knew, because of the mobile phones involved.
Look at all the asswipes have accomplished without even blowing anything up. It isn’t just that they’ve disrupted air travel, and will cause subsequent delays and irritations. They have the added propaganda win of every abettor of asswipes standing up and spitting on those marvelous people who broke the plot and saved all those lives. And that is something that will just keep on giving into the months to come. It’s a win-win situation for them.
And I need something to settle my stomach.
The cease-fire has been agreed upon, if what I saw in passing is true. This hasn’t been a good day.
Paul Sheehan’s story of:
A friend of mine, Jenny D, used to live in Lakemba. She began receiving insults from people in the street, usually Muslim women wearing headscarves, and sometimes Muslim men. If she wore a short skirt, she could expect abuse or comment. She left Lakemba.
reminds me of a friend of mine whose workmate was asked by his Muslim neighbour not to strip to the waist to mow his lawn because the Muslim’s wife might see him. Fortunately, the man told him, politely, to get lost. Welcome to suburban Gold Coast.
—Nick
Posted by The Thin Man Returns on 2006 08 14 at 07:38 AM • permalinkThanks again to the Religion of Annoying Inconvenience
Posted by Pogue Mahone on 2006 08 14 at 11:02 AM • permalinkAn important correction to Sheehan’s otherwise OK piece. The Maronites and Sunnis did NOT cooperatively govern Lebanon on terms of mutual respect.
In 1970s, on the verge of being able to rule Lebanon according to normal parliamentary evolution thanks to demographic advantages, the Muslims destroyed the only democracy—not a great democracy, but a democracy—that Arabs have ever known.
If George Bush knew anything about politics, he’d have known that and he wouldn’t go around talking like a ninny about how Muslims thirst for democracy.
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2006 08 14 at 12:40 PM • permalinkIf the bloody thing was half way, what did it profit anyone to turn it around?
Posted by David Gillies on 2006 08 14 at 01:50 PM • permalink#11
It means: We just need artists who can engage islamo-fascists with high calibre post-modern deconstruction.
Death to suicide bombers!
Oh, wait a minute.
Lfe to suicide bombers!
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2006 08 14 at 08:06 PM • permalink#4 JDB
I’ve seen the future of air travel…
(Bill Leak, Weekend Aus 12-13 Aug 06 no link, I looked last nite.)
Good evening. Working hard, in this busy time for you called. This is my friend and the Boke,just established, the time is not long. The issue here isthat everybody can see my Boke, Ha-ha, raising some visibility, which caused trouble to ask your forgiveness! We all hope to see. Please! 如烟往事博客 记忆深处博客 漠北孤烟博客 天涯无悔博客 月光城市博客 寂寞如烟博客 三国演义博客 江南记忆博客 青海日光博客 月复西斜博客 马帮茶道 雨天下雨博客 秋日私语博客 苍凉世界博客 把酒问天博客 逍遥过客 铿锵玫瑰 寂寞雨夜 乡下孩子博客 天上人间博客 我心飞翔 尘封往事博客 岁月如歌博客 庐山之恋 三间茅屋博客 wanqiudaocao
Sorry, cannot agree with Morris.
First off, his definition of ‘fascism’ is at least arguable, though I do not intend to argue it here.
But conflating it with Islam is wrongheaded in several important ways. The single most important, of course, is that Islam is a universalizing, salvationist monotheism, the most dangerous idea humans have ever come up with. (So is Christianity and it was equally dangerous until tamed over a period of 3 centuries by secularism and [cap L] Liberalism.)
Therefore, you can become a Muslim, in a way that you could not become a German or an Italian. Muslims are, as much as anybody, racists, but in degrees. I doubt many would accept Jewish converts, but they’re pretty catholic (pun intended) about who else they’ll take. Reid or Padilla, for example.
The next consequence of a universalizing, salvationist monotheism that separates it from the familiar fascisms of Germany and Italy is that, like communism, Islam is ideological.
German fascism or Nazism or Hitlerism or, as I prefer to think of it, Germanism, was self-limiting because the appeal of becoming an ubermensch was limited. The Japanese held their noses in order to associate with Germany militarily and diplomatically. No Japanese expected to become a German, and no German expected to welcome any Japanese into the family.
Islam is potentially and actually ready and able to recruit in any population.
As important as the bad effects of being a universalizing, salvationist ideology is the fact that Islam, like all organizations, including Tim Blair’s blog, has a program. This program is explicit: the gathering of all the world into Dar al-Islam. This is not just the program of Islamic fascists or Islamic extremists. It is the program of Islam, period.
Always has been. Unless Islam can be gutted of its violent universalism, as Christianity was, then it doesn’t matter how many ‘Islamofascists’ you deal with. Each little Muslim as he is born becomes an agent of the conversion of the entire world into Dar al-Islam.
The stated political goals of, say, bin Laden are not extremist. They are, in the context of universalizing Islam, modest.
Thus is the beginning of wisdom.
Posted by Harry Eagar on 2006 08 15 at 12:29 AM • permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
Members:
Login | Register
| Member List
Victorian Arts Minister Mary Delahunty, commenting at the Premier’s Literary Awards, links the terrorist arrests to fundamentalists:
“In this day, when most of us woke up to the knowledge of another foiled plot, we just need the artists to be a window into realities under construction and an antidote to fundamentalism on both sides,” she said.
So the Presbyterians are equally to blame after all. Look into the window of reconstructed realities! Ask a writer!