Sick ‘Security’
Blame PC dogma for your air-travel misery
TWOairport experiences over 24 hours tell us all we need to know about America’s misplaced security priorities. On Sunday, a multiple-sclerosis-afflicted friend in her 60s who walks with a cane was subjected by a surly Transportation Security Administration officer in Kennebunkport, Maine, to a hostile carry-on bag search in full view of dozens of other travelers.
He took so long to confiscate a jar of lemon curd that was one ounce “over the limit” that she nearly missed her flight.
The next day, my wife and I flew home from Tel Aviv’s BenGurion Airport. I braced for intense security that often includes tough questioning of fliers — even Israelis — to protect aircraft from bombs.
I knew that the drill was necessary. Terrorists have plotted for decades to blow up planes in and out of Tel Aviv; a few moments’ inconvenience was a small price for collective security.
So I was relieved that the exit procedure was polite, efficient and unintimidating. Even when an electronic passport reader rejected mine, an attendant reassured me and took me to a machine that worked.
That ease holds true for Israel writ large. Security measures are unobtrusive, often near-invisible.
Young soldiers on streets were as relaxed as scouts on an outing. At crowded prospective terror targets such as Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center shopping mall, friendly staff let everyone in with a perfunctory wave of a wand. Rothschild Boulevard — a cross between Fifth and Madison avenues — had no obnoxious barricades, but only inconspicuous, low-height bollards along the curb. Even Jerusalem’s emotioncharged Old City, rich in Jewish, Muslim and Christian landmarks, was a breeze to stroll through.
As for “If you see something, say something” — Israelis don’t need to have it pounded into them on every lamppost.
The martial air that I failed to find in Israel awaited me home in New York. After 10 days away, it felt like a police state, starting with the chaotic JFK Terminal 4 arrivals area. TSA workers shouted rude insults — “Can’t you people listen!” — to fliers trying to navigate a cattle-pen maze of barriers and passportreading screens, half of which didn’t work.
The NYPD’s proliferating concrete barriers make Times Square, many Midtown streets and the Wall Street area look like a war zone. So do machine guntoting cops and National Guard troops at Grand Central Terminal and Columbus Circle.
Why the contrast? Israeli personnel are trained to profile, while American ones are forbidden to profile due to politically correct revulsion over “discrimination.” Israeli agents can focus on those who might truly be dangerous, while ours are trained to regard every human being as an equivalent threat.
So our police practice wholesale crowd control that mainly makes life hell for pedestrians. The TSA subjects obviously harmless people to public harassment. See, no discrimination here, folks!
Israel’s method is minimally disruptive despite being highly effective. The fact that terror attacks have killed 85 Israelis since 2015 hardly implies a soft underbelly. Israel is objectively under siege by Hamas and Hezbollah, the Iranian regime and sundry other jihadists.
Against this grim backdrop, Israeli casualties — including victims of rockets fired from Gaza, which no internal security can stop — are small relative to the scope of the threat.
A 1973 Yom Kippur War veteran and private security specialist explained to me that Israel-style profiling didn’t necessarily mean singling out Arabs or Muslims. Rather, common-sense attention to anyone who raised a red flag — a bulging jacket in 90 degree heat, for example, or furtive behavior — lets security agents focus on potential threats without hassling tots and octogenarians.
For sure, the Big Apple has characteristics that make it unrealistic to do away with all intrusive security — human density, in particular. As many people live in the five boroughs as live in all of Israel, which is the size of New Jersey. After 9/11, our pols and cops can’t be entirely faulted for mounting a show of force. But while a fortress mentality might deter some perpetrators, it didn’t faze the truck-driving terrorist who killed eight people on the West Side on Halloween 2017.
Our brand of “security” makes everyone miserable but not safe. Maybe it’s because TSA agents are too focused on cuticle scissors that they have missed up to 95 percent of weapons, real and fake, that fliers and researchers recently tried to sneak onto planes. I remember one of them well — a large knife brought onto my JetBlue flight from Florida in 2011 by a Russian man who fortunately used it only to carve an apple before he was arrested upon landing.
One day, our dread of “discrimination” is going to blow up in our faces. But at least we’ll be safe from lemon curd.