…when one cannot tell who some other people are (with video)?
Lifting the veil on airport security
Air security won’t ask for veiled Muslims to prove ID…a man traveling with the group hands in all the passports and is the only one to interact with airline staff while two veiled women simply walk through…
But some have more sense:
…[the] call for lifting the veil is backed up by two Muslim groups often at odds with each other, the Muslim Canadian Congress and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Canada.
“You cannot allow a person wearing a mask to be in the perimeter of an airport,” says Tarek Fatah [more here and here] of the Congress. “If you don’t want to take off the mask, take the TTC (public transit) to Cairo.”
“Women who wear the niqab are not constrained by the religious belief from removing their veil for legitimate reasons, and security is one of them,” said Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of CAIR-CAN.
Gardee admits that Canadian officials may be reluctant to deal with this issue head-on due to concerns about political correctness. “It’s something that needs to be addressed,” Gardee said.
Gardee says it would be preferable if female staff were able to conduct any screening that involved removing the veil but adds that if female staff are not available, the women must still be forced to remove their niqab.
Update: Ezra Levant takes on Pernicious Peggy Atwood et al. (Ottawa Sun on a roll today).
Mark
Ottawa
The awesome, infinite stupidity of multi-culturalism.
Political correctness rears it’s ugly head,again.
Sigh.
Hirsi Ali tells what to expect, and provides a solution as well – are we willing to listen to calm , smart, honest, and experienced views, or will we continue with our head(s) in the sands, and continue to spit on our own democracy ?
If you watch Air Crash Investigation, A Canadian made program, you will see political correctness in Vancouver helped bring down Air India flight 182 in 1985 the episode is called Explosive Evidence.
And how does security know there were women behind the veils?
I was just discussing this with my father and sister actually. My Dad brought up a valid point I think. Security should not be the responsibility of the airline. Airlines shouldn’t be oblivious to security, but the responsibility for properly checking identification should rest, (if it does not already), with property security people who are not beholden to the airline for the wages. If the CATSA isn’t checking that women in niqabs are actually who they say they are, then the CATSA is not doing their job properly.
From an airline’s perspective it is unwise to insist that these women show their faces. They are almost certainly not terrorists, but they may simply be jerks who will launch an expensive lawsuit against the airline at the slightest provocation. As we all know a lawsuit does not have to be reasonable to be successful and it does not even need to be successful to be terribly expensive to the defendant.
Since an airline is primarily a profit seeking enterprise, letting them on the aircraft without showing their faces is the correct move, particularly in light of the fact that they’ve already passed through security.
I think it’s self-evident that you should be required to prove your identity to security and showing your face to security people is an integral part of that. But security should not be farmed out to airlines.
Having said that, the fact that Air Canada stupid and ham-fisted threat of a lawsuit against Mr. Flynn for posting his video shows yet again what a mess that company is.
Simply put, the same rules for ID checks that apply to everyone else must apply to veiled women – ask to go somewhere private and lift veil so security personnel can confirm identity with photo on document.
It is not clear from any coverage of this incident whether these passengers had their ID checked at passport control or not – this is normally the only place where ID is compared to passport photo, not at check in or at boarding gate.
Any link to video footage?
[...] a pilot…if I knew that somewhere back in the airport, security had let someone through on the say-so of “her” “husband” without actually verifying that the face beneath the burqa was the same as the face on the [...]