The Flydubai attacker’s motive was even darker than we thought

Israel came terrifyingly close to a mass-casualty aviation attack that could have killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, and severed the country’s principal air connection with the outside world. This is according to new intelligence from the interrogation of the Omani co-pilot who hijacked his own flight to Tel Aviv………

The news of Flydubai flight 1073’s miraculous escape from disaster thanks to its heroic Israeli passenger and crew members has been well documented. It was carrying almost 180 people, including 27 children, when its Omani co-pilot, Hammam al-Hammami, attacked Captain Smit Machchar in the cockpit and attempted to seize control of the aircraft. What is now emerging from the investigation makes the episode considerably darker.

Hammami reportedly told investigators that after killing the captain, he had intended to continue towards Israel as though making a normal landing approach, then divert at the last possible moment and crash into Ben Gurion airport. He also considered high-rise buildings in Tel Aviv. His calculation was straightforward and chilling: get close enough before revealing his intention that Israeli fighter aircraft would have no time to intervene.

That explains why Hammami did not attack at the beginning of the flight. He struck when the aircraft was already over Jordan,  much closer to Israel, when the distance between an apparently routine approach and catastrophe had narrowed dramatically.

Ben Gurion would have been a target with consequences far beyond the immediate massive death toll. A passenger aircraft driven into a crowded terminal during the Jewish holiday of Sukkot could have killed people in the air and on the ground on a scale Israel has rarely experienced. The flight was due to arrive at around 9:30 a.m., during one of the busiest travel periods of the year. Tens of thousands of people could have been passing through the airport complex.

Then there is the wider purpose. Ben Gurion is Israel’s principal physical connection with the world. It carries Israelis, tourists, diplomats, businesspeople, foreign workers, families and freight. A successful attack would have hit far more than a building. Airlines would have reconsidered flying to Israel. Insurers would have reassessed risk. Tourism, already badly damaged after years of war, could have collapsed further. The practical and psychological isolation of the country would have deepened immediately.

* * * * * * * *

The details are telling. Hammami prayed, then began his attack. This attack is a definite part of a pattern in which Islamist extremists have fused religious conviction with the deliberate murder of civilians. The ideology has a name. Its adherents have repeatedly told us what they believe, whom they consider enemies and what forms of violence they consider permissible.

Machchar, meanwhile, had no luxury of ideology or analysis. He understood that if he could not open the cockpit door, everybody would die. Badly injured, with his memory fragmented and his vision blurred, he found what he described as ‘one last fight’. The crew outside had been trying to gain access using the cockpit code (though the Israelis on board have said in interviews they did not know whether to trust the crew and were later assigned to shadow their every move until landing), while Hammami prevented the door from opening. Machchar forced himself towards the manual mechanism, reached the knob and twisted it. The door opened.

People outside were ready. That act may have saved nearly 180 people on the aircraft. If Hammami’s reported confession is accurate, it may also have saved hundreds or thousands more at Ben Gurion. And even before the full facts were known, another ugliness appeared.

I do not advise ‘warning shots’. A prosecutor could make the case that you doing so meant you felt your life wasn’t in danger enough to defend yourself, thus putting you behind the 8-Ball of the criminal “justice” system

Ann Arbor Coin Shop Clerk Fires Warning Shot, Foils Armed Robbery Bid

An armed man walked into Ann Arbor Stamps & Coins last Thursday afternoon, pulled a gun, and ran off empty-handed after the store’s own employee fired back with a warning shot. Ann Arbor police are now searching for two people believed to be connected to the attempted robbery, which unfolded at approximately 1:50 p.m. on August 27 in the 3000 block of Washtenaw Avenue.

According to an Ann Arbor Police Department update shared on Facebook by Breaking News 989, an adult male entered the store and produced a firearm before fleeing on foot. Police say a second adult male was already inside the shop and is now considered a person of interest, with investigators working to determine whether the two allegedly worked together in the attempt, as FOX 2 Detroit reports.

Investigators confirmed that the store clerk produced his own firearm and fired one shot during the encounter, an action FOX 2 Detroit describes as a warning shot that scared off the alleged robbers. No injuries were reported, nothing was struck by gunfire, and no property was taken from the shop. The clerk fought back rather than hand anything over, and both suspects ran from the scene.

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Yanis: Preserve, Pass On Legacy of Second Amendment

“Remember what brought you to where you are. Remember why you love doing what you’re doing and keep it going.”

That was the message from Jared Yanis, host of the YouTube channel Guns & Gadgets, who addressed the Gun Rights Policy Conference, challenging the audience to not only teach the next generation how to shoot, but why Americans have the special right to keep and bear arms.

“We have some incredible firearms instructors in this country,” Yanis observed. “We have competitive shooting, hunting, concealed carry classes, millions and millions of parents are teaching their kids, sons and daughters, about firearms safety. We have a pretty good chance of them being taught the right way.

“What worries me is much bigger,” he admitted. “Will the next generation understand WHY they have the right to do this? That’s a much bigger question, because there are two different things:

“Knowing how to operate a firearm is a skill,” he explained. “But understanding why the American citizen has the right to keep and bear arms is true education. If we lose that education, we will eventually lose that right.”

Yanis was not so much “preaching to the choir,” he was challenging every grassroots activist in the room to go beyond passing along a tradition, and carry on the process to a next level.

“We need to ask ourselves a difficult question: What exactly are we trying to preserve,” he posited. “Are we trying to preserve gun ownership? I’m not. Are we trying to preserve the principle that makes gun ownership a right in the first place? That’s what I’m about, because they’re not the same thing.”

He acknowledged that people in other countries own firearms, but under far different circumstances. It might involve licensing, government approval, registration and other restrictions.

“America was built around something fundamentally different,” he said. “The government doesn’t give you any of our rights. They’re just stewards of our rights. The Constitution doesn’t give us the right. The Bill of Rights doesn’t give us the right. We had those rights before anyone put quill to parchment.

“Now, the Second Amendment recognizes a pre-existing right that belongs to us, the people and it tells government ‘You shall not infringe,’” he stressed. “That distinction is everything. I don’t think we’re teaching it that way nearly enough.”

One problem with the current battle to protect Second Amendment rights is that people have become focused on “the controversy of the moment,” Yanis explained. This could involve bans on so-called “assault weapons,” original-capacity magazines, pistol braces or the “zero tolerance” philosophy of the Biden administration, which focused on cancelling federal firearms licenses for literally any infraction.

“Sometimes we become so focused on fighting the latest infringement,” Yanis observed, “that we forget to explain why that fire we’re fighting matters in the first place.”

Yanis focused on semi-auto rifles. He brought up the argument anti-gunners have made, that “nobody needs an AR-15.”

“And you’ll say, ‘Yes I do,’” he noted. “But why? Because it’s my right, or because the Second Amendment says so.

“If our education ends there,” he said, “we have a serious problem in America, because somebody on the other side is going to teach that young person, they’re going to give them an explanation of why they think they shouldn’t have an AR15. They’re going to talk about public safety, crime, mass shootings; all the blue tokens they throw out there to make people feel it in their hearts.”

He then boiled things down for the audience to remember and take home.

“The Founders didn’t include the Second Amendment because they loved guns,” Yanis said. “They included it because they understood power, and that’s the conversation we need to bring back to the forefront.

“The Constitution is fundamentally a document about power,” he continued. “Who has it. Where it comes from, how much the government possesses, how that power is divided and what happens when government exceeds it.

“The Founders had just fought a revolution against the most powerful government that they knew, and the most powerful military on this rock,” Yanis recalled. “And they didn’t emerge from that experience believing that human beings would suddenly stop abusing that authority. In fact, they knew it would happen again. So they built a system based on the opposite assumption, that power must be divided, it must be checked, and certain rights must remain beyond government’s legitimate reach.”

Among these are speech, religion, assembly and the right to keep and bear arms. Yanis explained how the Second Amendment is not just about a right to keep and bear arms. It’s about the entire constitutional philosophy, he said; the relationship between the citizen and the state.

“Once you understand that philosophy,” he stated, “once you get that relationship, once you know what the founders believed when they fought for this, the Second Amendment makes a lot more sense to you.”

He closed by reminding the GRPC audience that passing on the tradition in all the traditional ways is good and proper.

“Taking your kids shooting is fantastic,” Yanis affirmed. “Teaching them firearms safety is essential. Teaching them how to hunt is wonderful. But at some point, maybe on the ride home from those things, turn around and ask them this ‘Do you know why you have this right?’

“Teach them about Lexington and Concord,” he advised. “Teach them what happened on April 19, 1775.

Tell them why ordinary people possess arms and why it matters. Teach them about the Bill of Rights.

Teach them that with rights come responsibilities and that an armed citizen should be safe, but a responsible citizen, an informed citizen and most importantly, a citizen, and not a subject.”

More Than the ‘Assault Weapons’ SCOTUS Case, THIS is What Terrifies the Gun Control Industry Most of All.

“In recent years, women made up almost half of all new gun owners, a striking shift from the historical norm, when women accounted for about 24 percent of gun owners,” Rosanna Smart and Andrew R. Morral of the RAND Corporation recently wrote. “After more than a decade of stable gun ownership, women’s ownership rose starkly between 2018 and 2021, going from 10 percent of adult women owning guns in 2018 to 15 percent in 2021, then up again slightly to 16 percent by 2024.”

They add that the big surge in women’s gun ownership has occurred since 2018 and, almost without exception, is seen across the board without regard to race, age, income, party identification, or education. Men, too, have bought guns amidst record firearms sales boosted by the chaos of 2020, though not to the same transformative extent as women. As broad demand for the means of self-defense has put the lie to the already overstated argument that gun ownership was a passing fixation of rural white men, women have rushed to take advantage of the empowering technology.

“Some of the largest relative increases were among groups of women with historically low rates of gun ownership, such as Hispanic women and those living in the Upper Midwest, who saw ownership rates more than double after 2018,” add the RAND authors.

Smart and Morral draw on data from the General Social Survey (GSS), which is conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago. The GSS numbers largely square with other sources.

“Ownership is demographically diverse: 45.7% of validated gun owners are female, 25.6% do not identify as White (alone), and the gap in ownership rates between White Americans (34.6%) and Black Americans (33.0%) has narrowed to less than two percentage points,” Georgetown University’s William English wrote last month, of numbers from the National Firearms Survey.

— J.D. Tuccille in Women Are Better Armed Than Ever

Pandering to invaders

Gavin Newsom signs Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha into law as new California state holidays.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that formally recognizes two Muslim holidays as state holidays on Sunday, making it the second state to formally recognize both holidays statewide.

California Assembly Bill 2017 officially added Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha to the list of state holidays, which would permit public schools and colleges to close and allow state employees to be eligible to observe the holidays.

However, schools and businesses will not be required to close on these days, and courts will be required to stay open.

This makes California the second state in the country, after Washington state, to pass statewide legislation recognizing the Muslim holidays.

Before signing AB 2017, Newsom had multiple bills on his desk that provided protections and exceptions for other religious observances, including Jewish holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

For example, AB 395, which reached the governor days before AB 2017, would codify these Jewish holidays, among others, into state law and require state agencies and facilities like schools to “make every reasonable effort” to avoid scheduling significant functions for those days.

Another bill, AB 1763, would also guarantee students in K-12 be allowed excused absences for religious holidays.

Though these bills were introduced and presented to the governor before AB 2017, Newsom did not sign the additional bills into law until Wednesday, prior to the midnight deadline.

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No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.
— James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses