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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