By now most of America has heard or read of the six-year-old girl frisked and searched by TSA’s blue-clad goons at New Orleans’ airport. The girl’s parents, Dr. Todd and Selena Drexel, were interviewed on Fox News Channel this morning by Gretchen Carlson.
Carlson’s interview — good mother that she undoubtedly is, and coming during the morning period when networks assume mostly women are watching — focused like a laser beam on the mental anguish this little girl experienced. Mesdames Carlson and Drexel commiserated, understandably so, on how this assault in the name of airport and airline security contradicted everything young children are told about strangers touching them, and how the Drexel girl cried afterward.
But at the risk of appearing insensitive (perhaps congenital with me, as my friends have noted — or else stemming from the fact that my children are both boys): Is a six-year-old’s emotional state really the key issue here? Probably not. Dr. and Mrs. Drexel noted that when they asked the Blue Meanies (my phrase, not the Drexels’) why their daughter was being treated so suspiciously, they were not given an answer. At least one journalist who covers national security argued that the TSA was acting rationally, since “it’s not beyond al Qaeda to use kids.”
Well. It’s true that those who motivate and employ suicide bombers have, in recent years, significantly lowered the minimum age to start work. But heretofore all such prepubescent projectiles have been Muslim and male! Recruited by the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “the black-turbaned recruits, typically 12 or 13 but some as young as 7, recite Koran verses” until after breakfast, when they learn how to conduct “vehicle borne suicide attacks.”
As of this date, no Christian or Jewish children have been turned into bombs in the name of the caliphate (although plenty have been killed as targets). Perhaps the Drexels left their daughter alone somewhere in the airport like the wayward luggage which airport announcements are always warning about, where she could be replaced with an armed jihadist clone or perhaps quickly brainwashed and stuffed full of deadly corbomite — but I rather doubt it.
The Drexels would seem to be either Christian or Jewish (they’re certainly not Muslim), so barring the aforementioned instant Manchurian moppet scenario, the chances of them having raised their daughter to self-immolate in flight is non-existent. As Levitt and Dubner lay out quite logically and clearly in Superfreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance (pp. 93ff): “A person with neither a first nor a last Muslim name [stands] only a 1 in 500,000 chance of being a suspected terrorist. The likelihood for a person with first or last Muslim name was 1 in 30,000. For a person with first and last Muslim names, however, the likelihood jumped to 1 in 2,000….likely terrorists [are] predominantly men…between the ages of 26 and 35….”
Other researchers, most notably the Danish child psychologist Nicolai Sennels who studies Muslims in Europe, have found that Islamic culture tends to lead to terrorism (because Islam instills anger, hurt pride, feelings of victimization, and a superiority complex like no other religion). On the meta-level, there is also a link between support for political Islam and for terrorism, as counterterrorism expert Patrick Poole explained a few years ago.) And as I pointed out on my History News Network blog back in 2009, well over half of the planet’s terrorist groups claim Islam as their inspiration, modus operandi, and goal.
So, in light of such overwhelming empirical data — not to mention the daily evidence of global Islamic terrorism available to any with eyes to see — there is absolutely no reason to suspect anything terror-related about a non-Muslim young girl whose last name is “Drexel.” This is far more than simply a matter of the TSA’s screeners acting as Blue Meanies to a little girl — as reprehensible as that is, in and of itself. The shame is that the Blue Morons who run the TSA (and, in fact, our current administration) set policies that, in a total denial of reality, require their underlings to harass little girls instead of profiling those most likely to engage in airborne jihad.
As the Beatles sang at the end of Yellow Submarine: “It’s All Too Much.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member