A plague of persistent P.C. follies in America’s airports…

The invaluable Heather Mac Donald weighs in on the sacrifice of the Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System, or Capps II, at the hands of the civil liberties brigade.

Annie Jacobsen and Clint Taylor follow-up on Flight 327. Time magazine talks to a federal air marshal who was on the plane.

Nour Mehana was not on the flight, as Clint initially speculated, but he has much more info on other passengers and associates of Mehana’s band, including one Atef Kamel. Excerpt:

I asked Mr. Kamel about the lyrics to a song called “Um al Shaheed” — “Mother of a Martyr” — that Mr. Mehana has recorded. It is not about suicide bombers, he insisted, but about soldiers who die in battle. Besides, if Mr. Mehana didn’t do that old standard, “the people wouldn’t like him.” Mr. Kamel was raised Muslim but is now Catholic; he stated that suicide bombing bars you from heaven in both religions. “If you kill yourself, you’re evil.”

And on this subject Mr. Kamel said something I didn’t expect him say: there are Middle Eastern bands out there with ties to terror groups. “I am a proud Arab American,” he said. “But I don’t deny there are some bad people” out there. He then named a couple of singers — I will demur from repeating their names, but they appear to be quite prominent in Middle Eastern music — whom he said had tried to enter the United States but were turned down because of alleged connections to [radical] Shi’a or to Hezbollah. One of them played at a party linked to Hezbollah. A rockin’ affair that must have been.

Mr. Kamel has no problem with keeping terror-linked bands out of the United States. “That’s how I like it!” he said. “Check them out and stop them over there — if there’s a problem, don’t even let them in.” He also welcomed surveillance of the bands while in the United States: “You have to have some people follow [the bands] around, so you don’t leave people behind. You don’t want to come over with 14 and leave with 12.”

In case you missed that: A successful promoter with intimate knowledge of the Middle Eastern music scene admits that a few connections exist between Islamic terrorists and musicians, and that care is warranted in screening the musicians’ visits to the United States. For those of you in the “mere paranoia” camp: Denial isn’t just a nightclub in New Jersey…

Finally, the Washington Times editorializes on the DOT’s refusal to put passenger safety over political correctness.

Update: Heather Wilhelm, who first reported on the disturbing lyrics of Nour Mehana’s golden oldie, Um Al Shaheed, reacts to Mr. Kamel’s comments to Clint Taylor on her blog.

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