Future generations will surely look back on our times and conclude that we were completely mad. I’m not just talking about the unhinged Covid panic years, or the blatant lunacy of pretending that men in dresses are ‘real women’. Nor even the unhinged lunacy of making large swathes of our economy, and practically our entire higher education system, beholden to a communist dictatorship that sits atop a pile of an estimated 70 million corpses, still runs vast gulags and routinely pillages billions of dollars of intellectual property.
Nope, it’s our weak-kneed infatuation with Islam. Despite the endless evidence that ‘radical’ Islam is, in fact, just Islam, we have kept making more and more room for Islam. Not least in some of our most critical national security spheres. How many times do we have to be subjected to the humiliating ritual of getting bomb-checked by a hijabi at the airport before we wake up? And then there’s the matter of the pilots. The Flydubai attempted hijacking is not so isolated an incident as we would like to believe. Yet, while pilots attempting or succeeding in suicide-crashing planes are rare, Muslim pilots are disproportionately over-represented in such incidents.
The Israelis, to their credit, aren’t taking chances any more.
Air France has banned Pakistani pilots and crew members from operating flights to and from Israel, after the Jewish nation reinforced restrictions for airline crew from countries that don’t have diplomatic relations with it. The move follows the attempted terror attack by Omani co-pilot aboard a FlyDubai flight on September 30.
You can almost hear the collective shriek of the right-on classes, clutching their pearls in the hallowed halls of Human Resources departments across the West. To suggest that a pilot’s background, or, dare we say it, their allegiance to a faith that commands global submission, might have a bearing on their suitability for the cockpit is, of course, the ultimate heresy. But while the West continues its tedious, performative dance of ‘inclusivity’, Israel has decided that the lives of its passengers are marginally more important than the feelings of international airline unions.
Following the Air France ban on airline crew from 31 nations, including Pakistan, Chicago-based United Airlines has informed their pilots and cabin crew about nationality-based rules for flights to and from Israel. These restrictions have raised questions about their implications for international aviation and if more airlines would follow the same to comply with Israeli rules.
It’s a refreshing breath of sanity: A state acting in its own rational self-interest. While we permit our borders to be porous and our skies to be navigated by the very people who wish us ill, the Israelis have dusted off the rulebook and decided that sovereignty, not to mention the safety of their citizens rather than the hurty feelings glass-jawed Muslims, actually means something. The list of restricted nations, a veritable ‘who’s who’ of the Islamic world, from Iran and Iraq to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, is an admission of reality that our own feckless political class is too cowardly to voice.
The enforcement, if reports are to be believed, has been swift and unforgiving. We are told of an Ethiopian Airlines flight that was unceremoniously ordered to turn back mid-flight because an Indonesian national was found to be at the helm. Imagine the indignation! To be plucked from the clouds, sent scurrying back to the departure point, all because a nation finally decided that security isn’t just a suggestion to be ignored at the altar of political correctness.
According to ch-aviation, the internal scheduling memo of United Airlines, lists 29 countries whose nationals might be barred from working on its flights to and from Tel Aviv. The countries are Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Cuba, Djibouti, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Venezuela and Yemen.
Of course, the professional grievance-mongers are already sharpening their pens. The unions, those stalwart guardians of institutional stagnation, are bleating about ‘discrimination’. You’d laugh, if it wasn’t so deadly serious. If a company finds that a specific demographic has an annoying habit of attempting to steer aircraft into the ground, a prudent manager might consider that a valid reason for a change in personnel policy. To call this ‘discrimination’ is to admit that the primary purpose of our current aviation industry is not the safe transport of souls, but the maintenance of a social engineering project that prioritises diversity over the basic physics of not crashing.
While we persist in our delusional slumber, patting ourselves on the back for our enlightened tolerance, the world continues to turn. Some nations, it seems, prefer to keep their citizens breathing rather than bow before the altar of globalist optics.
At least, when the history books are written in the ruins of our civilisational decline, we will know that Israel tried to keep the cockpit doors closed. The rest of us? We were too busy worrying if the pilots felt sufficiently ‘validated’.
