Outlook

As a frequent traveler in the United States I have long been amazed by the passivity with which Americans have submitted to the post-9/11 airport security regime — the removing of belts and shoes and the endless lines that necessitate ever longer amounts of time spent in the airport. On one recent trip I was subjected to a special wand-waving with my arms and legs spread apart on successive flights. The second time it happened I asked what about me had triggered the higher level of scrutiny and I was told it was my baggy pants. “Give me back my belt and I assure you my pants will not be baggy ” I replied. About the best that can be said for the labor intensive airport security is that it has provided jobs for thousands of otherwise unemployable people.

Perhaps my irritability in American airports has something to do with the fact that I have a basis of comparison because I live in Israel. Flights to and from Israel are the most likely to be targeted of any flights in the world and yet I can leave Israel without removing either my shoes or belt and usually with a much shorter wait in line than in America. And I do so with a far higher degree of confidence that no one with malevolent intent is on my flight.

The surveillance in Israel starts long before one even reaches the airport and entails multiple levels prior to even reaching the personal security check. The large number of people congregated in airports makes them inviting targets long before anyone boards a plane. The Israeli approach takes that into account; the North American approach does not. At each level in Israel — as one’s car approaches the airport as one enters the airport and most intensively prior to entering the ticketing lines — one is subjected to personal scrutiny and in the latter to a series of questions.

That personal scrutiny — profiling if you will — acknowledges that there is little conceivable incentive that would induce an octogenarian grandmother from Iowa to blow herself up. Thus the danger comes almost entirely from those who fit into a group of those with an ideological/theological incentive to blow themselves up or those dumb enough to have accepted something from such a person. The set of such people falls into some fairly narrow parameters. It certainly includes someone whose own father had warned the American embassy in Nigeria that his son might have been brainwashed by radical Islamists like last X-mas’s underwear bomber responsible for the latest ratcheting up of invasive searches by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). He however was not placed on a “no-fly” list. That did not stop Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano from proclaiming “The system worked ” after an alert fellow passenger prevented the terrorist from igniting himself.