Air Marshal Emails Patterico: Yes, I Believe Flight 327 Was A Terrorist "Dry Run"

He say's he cannot, of course, be 100% certain, but it's his belief those 13 "musicians" acting strangely on that flight were attempting to probe the security response from the air crew.

The incident highlights the left-right divide on terrorism. Most of the left claims to take terrorism -- in the abstract -- seriously, and yet they denigrate any specific incident of terrorism, suspected terrorism, or terrorist dry-run as the unhinged ravings of rightwing Fear of a Brown Planet lunatics.

Annie Jacobsen, who was on Flight 327 and first reported on the incidents that took place during it, was widely derided by the left as being paranoid. I think T-Bogg, "a somewhat popular cretin," is fairly representative of leftist opinion when he dubs her Panickin' Annie. The Liberal Avenger titles a post on the incident " Annie Jacobsen and the Xenophobic Horror of Northwest Flight 327."

It's not just this incident, of course. Even the SkyBomb plot to blow up multiple UK-to-US flights, called by Scotland Yard one of the biggest terrorist plots in history, was/is derided as "overblown" and even, as Andrew "The Only True Conservative In America" Sullivan suggested, entirely manufactured by the governments of the US and UK to help defeat Ned Lamont.

There really isn't much room between the left as a whole and the Truthers. The left denigrates all current terrorist threats as the product of rightwing hysteria and fear of brown people and, yes, utter manufacture by Western governments, whereas the Truthers merely take this line of thought to its logical conclusion and claim 9/11 itself was pepetrated by Bush and his PNAC Stealth Demolition Team.

If the left actually takes terrorism seriously, why is it their reaction to every single instance of terrorism is snark and derisive chuckling?

I hope it's not just my rightwing jingoistic brownophobic hysteria talking when I say these stances -- 1, we take terrorism very seriously, but 2, we giggle at the naivete of everyone taking terrorism seriously -- are rather inconsistent.

And rather disparately evidenced. While one could write books documenting the left's Position 2, one searches in vain for actual evidence of Position 1, other than the left's empty assertions that they do in fact believe terrorism, in the very abstract and hypothetical, is a genuine threat.

Can any lefties point out a post in which a threat of terrorism has been greeted with anything other than conspiracy-mongering and juvenile sniggering?

posted by Ace at 10:24 AM

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