FlyerTalk Forums - 'Pyrotechnic device' found on domestic flight

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Quote:

Originally Posted by redpalmetto (Post 13073271)

yes Yaatri, but its not non-Muslims trying to blow up aeroplanes!

Only Muslims blow up planes? All Muslims blow up planes? All who look likes like a Muslim are likely to blow up planes?
But as soon as one, even a Muslim, changes one's name from Dawood Gilani to David Coleman Headley, he becomes less suspicious!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DevilDog438 (Post 13073402)

No worries, that is the thing with hypotheses, some of them will be wrong. At the time of my post, that information from the individual was not available in any story that I had been able to find.

I understand that you might not have come across that information, bur it's not fir to say that it was not available, because I looked for it when I heard about the incident from my brother, who told me the person claimed that he did n ot know that fire crackers were not allowed on board. The first few stories were old but I did find out the story under "New Results for fire crackers on a plane". One of those stories gave the ionformation you did not have. That was This thread was started a little over 4 hours after I dug up the information that you did not have. May be it was the way you searched.

What I was talking about was that the speed with which a given piece of information travels and becomes important news and how a specific action is looked at depends on the amount of hysteria, which depends on ethnicity and religion of the person involved.

The point being, the siory would have spread a lot of faster had the character involved been more interesting. :)

I do agree with the point that some hypotheses would be wrong, especially those based on little information, as was your case, as well as those based on fear and hysteria (the Nigerian guy in the bathroom or two Sikhs in a bathroom in 2002)

Quote:

Originally Posted by exerda (Post 13073387)

Question is, how do you profile "Muslim?" Plenty of gents (and ladies) fit the bill of "radical Islamist" without fitting the physical description that is the stereotype of so many Americans' minds.

John Walker Lind, for example... maybe that guy wouldn't be blowing himself up; I dunno. But as "the American Taliban," he wouldn't exactly have been caught by the sort of profiling so many people are calling for. Nor would the Chechnyan women who blew themselves up in that Russian terror attack a few years ago.

A good question. You can't. Why do you think a brown or dark skinned non- Muslim people speaking a language other than Arabic were detained merely because they were speaking a foreign language? Why do you think more than a few brown skinned non-Muslims, i.e. Sikhs, Hindus and even Christians are harassed in the name of security while people like John Lindh Walker, or David Headley are allowed to move freely? According to David Headley, he changed his name from Dawood Gilani to David Coleman Headley so that he could travel "without hassle". He is accused of planning attacks in Denmark and India, as well as for planning Bombay bombings. We have to dig ourselkves out of this mindset that looking for people with certain characteristics is the way to go about foiling terrorist plots. The reason why the Nigerian guy slipped through was what I have stated above.
While it was fresh in people's mind that Nigerians could be terrorists also, (in addition to well known scammers), a simple situation of the guy using the bathroom evolved into a major threat the President was informed. :D If that's not mass hysteria and paranoia, I don't know what is.