Nerve Endings Firing Away

British holidaymakers staged an unprecedented mutiny – refusing to allow their flight to take off until two men they feared were terrorists were forcibly removed. The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic [source].

Shocking! No wonder Bin Laden finds it easier to recruit more people in to his terror organization. The real intentions of the terrorists is not to kill people or make a political statement or anything more sinister; it is simply “creating terror” i.e. creating an atmosphere of terror in which you would act irrationally and refuse to live the life you would otherwise do without batting an eyelid.

In this case, I am not sure why the airlines caved and asked the poor men to disembark. They should have simply asked the complaining passengers to take another flight if they suspected them to be terrorists.

I remember boarding a flight to Chicago, accompanied by a passenger who had a kitten in an animal cage in the cabin. The poor animal was justifiably scared and restricted in the small cage. The kitten squealed and meowed while waiting to board the flight and throughout the flight. Before boarding, when some passengers complained to the stewardess, she told them that passengers with pets have as much right to travel as we do and if anyone was significantly disturbed then they would accomodate them on a later flight. The complaining passengers piped down soon after.

But I guess in this “day of terror”, dark-skinned men speaking in strange tongues have lesser rights than a frightened kitten.