Sorry for the ongoing theme here today, but this kind of thing has got to stop:
id Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab really mean to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 as it came in for a landing on Christmas Day over Detroit, or was the object of his terrorist plot simply to scare us? As bizarre a question as that seems to be, Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan indulgently quotes six paragraphs from one of his readers espousing that exact theory.
The reader’s argument seems to hinge upon the supposition that the goal of Islamic terrorists is terror for the sake of terror, and that if terrorists really wanted to bring down an airliner, Abdulmutallab would not have carried out his attack in the manner that he did.
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A man does not set fire to his penis for a job he expects to botch. Period.
“A man does not set fire to his penis for a job he expects to botch. Period.”
Can I get an amen?
With the possible exception of Andrew Sullivan himself.
Unless, like sully, he hasn’t got one.
That is assuming that Fruit of the Boom knew it was a dud.
Of course the terrorists want to cause fear, that’s why they’re called “terror-ists” and not “inconvenience-ists”. Just because they want you to be afraid doesn’t mean it isn’t a good idea to be afraid. Biologists have a word for creatures that don’t feel fear: Lunch.
This “theory” doesn’t even pass the smell test. Why go through all the trouble of getting PETN onto a plane if all you want to do is make some flame? Black powder would be even more dramatic, probably easier to get on board, and is much cheaper.
Good God, this is what passes for thinking at The Atlantic? No wonder I never heard of the thing before the Internet.
That’s as far as I would have needed to go with that thought.