Saturday
7 Jun 2008
DHS Signs Deal With Israel on Airport Security
By Annie Jacobsen in category U.S. Homeland Security
Is Israeli-style airport security coming to America? For anyone tired of TSA treating their toiletries as a menace, there's good news on the horizon.
On May 29th, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff signed a landmark deal with Israel to share information about airport security. This means that DHS will beef up its behavior profiling system which looks for bombers, not bombs.
Although Israel's passenger profiling system is based on behavior, critics say it's based on race.
In my column for Pajamas Media this morning, I explain why this inference is false — citing the bloody Lod Airport massacre in May 1972 which killed twenty-six people, including sixteen Americans.
The massacre — carried out by Japanese college-aged kids willing to die for the Palestinian cause — fundamentally changed Israeli's approach to security. They haven't had an attack in the aviation domain since.
(photo: Kozo Okamoto, convicted terrorist in the Lod Airport massacre, since renamed Ben-Gurion International Airport, after his release from an Israeli jail in a prisoner exchange. Photo credit unknown)