Does the world remember why we need airline security in the first place?

Every time I travel overseas I go through the security checks we now find at airports all around the world. As the recipient of a double hip replacement, it’s always amusing to see the reaction when the metal detector goes off, even when I present the security people with a letter from the medical center that did the surgery. The more knowledgeable security people wave me out of line for a pat-down when they see the letter. The less experienced panic and get a couple of hefty, muscle-bound jerks to take me into a side room for a strip search. Fortunately, I haven’t met many of those in the past few years.

Each time I go through this, I ask myself whether any of the billions of people who travel and have been going these strict and often annoying checks for years now ever take a few seconds to think about the reason for this screening process, which has become an integral part of every flight by now. Most of them seem to accept it as if it’s a prerequisite for air travel; just as you have to have a ticket and passport, you have to stand in line and go through the security check.

A whole generation (in fact, it’s now two generations) of passengers seem convinced that the need for airline security was born alongside the first ever commercial flight. But some of us older passengers remember why every traveler now has to undergo those checks. We can also remember that many years ago we could walk from the terminal to the airplane on the adjacent tarmac and fly from one location to another without any interruptions. Granted, the planes were smaller, slower and there was no in-flight movie, but we could just buy a ticket, board a plane and go—and all the flight attendants were young, female and single...

Therefore, it’s odd that even those who still remember this “ancient era” either don’t think about, or don’t want to think about the reason for the addition of the pre-flight security procedures. The fact is that one Yasser Arafat and the terrorist gangs he commanded introduced the need of security checks after inventing the notion of hijacking planes for the purposes of blackmailing the Free World.

Who are the real victims?

These gangs, such as Black September or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, forced the nations of the world and airlines around the world to invest – and continue investing – billions of dollars in sophisticated electronic equipment and trained security personnel.

By the way, if we’re going to mention the names of some of those gangs, we can also mention that Black September wasn’t named to commemorate the killing of Palestinians by Israel, but rather to commemorate the massacre committed by the army of Jordan’s King Hussein in September 1970 in a Palestinian refugee camp during his war against the PLO, which was trying to take over his country at the time. (Based on Arafat’s estimate, more than 3,000 Palestinians were butchered at the time, but there’s no doubt that the number of victims was much higher.)

Once in a while, just to pass the time in the line, I turn to a security officer (anywhere in the world) – politely – and ask them to explain why these checks are necessary. Since they always reply in one form or another that it’s about in-flight security, I ask another question: “Yes, but who are we afraid of and who are the ones that make it necessary for us to maintain this security screening?” The answer is always the same:

“Airplanes are hijacked by Arab terrorists.”

Even those unfamiliar with the Palestinian hijackings of the late 1960s and 1970s can still remember the al-Qaeda hijackers who brought down the Twin Towers and exploded in the Pentagon on September 11th.

So if everyone knows the reason for the daily nuisance suffered by billions of travelers all over the world every year and for the expenditure of billions of dollars, how can it be that most passengers and their governments still think that the people behind all this are the victims?

The real victims are in fact the citizens of the entire Free World (and even those of the not-so-free world,) who are being extorted time and again, every day and on every flight, to pay for the security measures necessary to counter their actions.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for airport security, despite the personal inconvenience involved. I’d rather stand in a line for half an hour or more and go through the metal detector, get patted down and questioned about my baggage and its contents than have the plane blow up in mid-flight or get hijacked to some unfriendly location—THAT would really ruin my day.