Saturday, April 12, 2014

Violent jihad heading our way?


The media is mostly ignoring the early evidence that flight 370 was deliberately taken off-course and ditched by the pilot. From a March 18 story:

Late yesterday it emerged that the turn that diverted the missing Malaysian Airlines plane off its flight path was programmed into the aircraft's computer navigation system, probably by someone in the cockpit, the New York Times reported. That reinforces the increasing belief among investigators that the aircraft was deliberately diverted, the newspaper said, quoting US officials...Rather than manually operating the plane's controls, whoever altered Flight 370's path typed seven or eight keystrokes into a computer situated between the captain and the co-pilot, according to officials. The computer is called the Flight Management System.

Even someone as sensible and well-informed as James Fallows seems to be avoiding that conclusion, instead clinging to the unlikely narrative of a fire in the plane that somehow destroyed the plane's navigation system and sent it off-course to its doom:

No theory of the plane's disappearance makes sense. But I've mentioned several times that I thought the "Chris Goodfellow scenario" required few logical leaps than most. Goodfellow, a Canadian who now lives in Florida, has hypothesized the following sequence: a sudden inflight emergency, followed by a turn back toward airports in Malaysia, followed by a still-unexplained incapacitation of the crew, and a still-unexplained flight out over the ocean.

Only a liberal's fear of the real, simpler explanation---terrorism motivated by Islam---explains this sloppy thinking by a very smart guy. But Fallows at least links a contrary, more logical explanation here and here that the plane was deliberately piloted off-course. Recall the early hope by liberals that the Boston Marathon bombing last year wasn't by anyone in the Rainbow multicultural coalition (Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American).

Sam Harris rightly calls this state of denial about radical Islam a potentially "ruinous self-deception."

If it turns out to be terrorism motivated by Islam, the people in the most danger would be the Moslem Uighurs in China, since most of the 239 passengers were Chinese, and Uighurs carried out a recent attack at a Chinese airport. Chinese authorities must be making plans for this possibility to avoid a horrific ethnic-religious conflict in China.

Examples are in the news every day. Yesterday's edition of the SF Chronicle alone, for example, had several stories about Islamist terrorism in three countries: Blasts in central Syria city of Homs kill 25Car bombs in Baghdad, Iraqi town kill 34 people, and Bomb blast in Pakistani capital kills 22.

Violent jihad seems to heading our way, as reported in the Chronicle story last Thursday linking the attack on P.G. and E.'s San Jose substation and the use of a photo[above] of a BART car in Al Qaeda's new edition of its online magazine. 





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6 Comments:

At 4:20 PM, Anonymous sfthen said...

This is off-topic and thus meant for Rob; article here has title, "China's bike culture forges way into deadly traffic" but it is not about a burgeoning "bike culture" but rather about how former bicyclists are buying cars now that China is entering the 20th Century (still got a ways to go to get into the 21st) and are driving their cars like they rode their bicycles, that is, they ignore all vehicle regulations!
China Bikes
Sounds just like SF cyclists.

 
At 9:00 PM, Blogger Rob Anderson said...

Okay to be off-topic if I like your comment. Four years ago I mocked Streetsblog's dismay at how the Chinese were trading in their bikes for cars. The Chinese are now driving their cars like cyclists in SF ride their bikes, a weird confluence of "progress" and regression.

 
At 7:22 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Any individuals or groups who are not completely repulsed by the scene of people playing soccer with severed heads will likely believe any explanation of what happened on this flight. When the truth comes out it will be that the pilot and or co-pilot were believers or even part of a shadow cell.

 
At 12:23 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

that is, they ignore all vehicle regulations!

Sounds just like SF drivers to me.

 
At 12:27 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Only a liberal's fear of the real, simpler explanation---terrorism motivated by Islam---

Bullshit. This event is counter to the entire concept of terrorism. Terrorism by it's nature is supposed to strike fear into the heart of the target. By simply diverting the plane and flying it into the ocean in a manner which nobody can discern, it only puts confusion into brains, not terror into hearts.

If these guys were terrorists, they are the worst terrorists in history.

 
At 12:36 PM, Blogger Rob Anderson said...

Your "concept" of violent jihad is flawed. Last year Andrew Bostom clearly explained "individual jihad."

For the violent jihadi, it's always a Good Thing to kill unbelievers. As al Qaeda's online magazine explains, it's the jihadi's relationship to Allah that's the main thing:
"When a Muslim becomes a mujahid,
the only thing standing between him and entering Paradise is a sincere intention. He must protect his intention constantly, and do all acts of services for Allah’s sake, whether big or small. That’s it. That’s all it takes to become victorious after death."

That is, radical, violent Islam is essentially an other-worldly death cult centered around a psychopathic god, which is a projection of their own religious insanity.

Besides, how do you explain the path of the plane? Someone was piloting that plane. A former head investigator for the NTSB:

"Too many deliberate actions maneuvering the airplane and turning off communications systems occurred to have any plausible mechanical failure explanation. He completely discounts theories that a fire, either in the electronics bay or involving lithium-ion batteries being transported in a cargo bay, disabled the airplane. He also discounts a theory that there was a depressurization that incapacitated the pilots and allowed the 777 to meander over the skies of the Gulf of Thailand, Malaysia and the Strait of Malacca before turning south 3,000 miles over the Indian Ocean before running out of fuel.

'When you look at the way the systems shut down just prior to the last communications—the transponder, then ACARS…' and the fact that ACARS had 'pinging' communication with satellites after the transmission of data stopped, tells this veteran investigator that human intervention was responsible.

Some hypothesized that the airplane flew on auto pilot on its diverse flight path after pilots were disabled by fire. Feith discounted this as well.

'The transponder is turned off with a switch of a switch. ACARS goes off line with a few key strokes,' Feith told us. 'If there was a fire, the auto pilot would have gone off line.'

Fire could not have disabled the transponder, he said. There are different wire bundles for the five radios, the two transponders and the ACARS precisely to avoid a single-source fire capable of disrupting these eight communications devices.

'There is no centralized area where a fire could take all these out at the same time,' he said.

As for the related theory that the auto pilot took over after the crew was disabled by hypoxia, the series of left and right hand turns belies this, he said. If the crew were overcome, the airplane would have continued on its original course to Beijing. Instead, it made a 'shallow' left turn after its last radio communication with Malaysian Air Traffic Control to a new course almost behind its original course. Then, over the Strait of Malacca, it made a right turn, a left turn and another left turn going south over the Indian Ocean.

Citing his sources familiar with the investigation, Feith said these were shallow banks of perhaps 20 degrees, normal turns that would not have alerted passengers that anything was out of the ordinary..."

The black boxes will eventually be found and will shed some light on how this happened.

 

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