THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

The first airline hijackings by Arabs broke out in 1970. About a month after that I took a trip to Africa with a lot of stops at airports in Europe.

Before the 1970 rash of hijackings there were absolutely no searches of airline passengers. In the early 1960s, I once accidentally stepped onto a plane at Memphis airport that was completely empty! I went into the cockpit looking for somebody and then got off and found the plane I was supposed to be on.

The 1970 hijackings changed everything. Each airline tried something different. A lot of them had each passenger come into a little room and get a quick frisk.

To my surprise I found that I was getting profiled. Other passengers would go in and get out of the search room in a couple of minutes. They went over me with a fine toothed comb, taking ten or fifteen minutes and double checking. This puzzled me.

Somewhere in the air over Africa, I suddenly realized why I was being searched so especially.

I once worked in a prison. Everybody who came in, including the warden, got frisked before being admitted inside. Usually it was a light check, but they also had random thorough searches of each person who came in regularly.

So when I walked into the little airline search room, I took the perfect stance for being frisked. I held my jacket out in my right hand, kept my knees bent slightly, and held my hands rigidly out.

If there was a wall I probably propped my hands against it.

This worried the searchers. You see, the average airline passenger does not go into frisk position routinely as if he has lined up in a police station a hundred times before.

Do you think I was upset at the airlines? Of couse not. I looked like I belonged to a suspect population, so they searched me. That was the whole point of the exercise.

The following is something I wrote in Bob's Blog

Denying The Holocaust

In Germany or France anyone who says that less than six million Jews were killed by the Nazis is given an automatic sentence of one or two years in prison. Any witness for them receives the same sentence, so they are allowed no defense based on evidence.

I know very little about the subject, but I know the Holocaust deniers are right.

Why?

Because I am a freeborn American. I know that anything the government REQUIRES you to believe is not true.

I also know that anyone who cannot face debate and needs the government to outlaw all dispute is, and I use this word rarely and specifically, a liar.

Denying the Holocaust is the duty of every decent person.

One of the invaluable commenters on Bob's Blog reminded me that anyone who denied that four million Jews were thrown into gas ovens at Auschwitz was automatically sentenced to a year in prison. Then the authorities admitted that the gas ovens there had been built by them after the war.

The camps in Germany, where Andy Rooney announced on national television that he had SEEN the Holocaust, have now been proven and admitted not to have been death camps. Every single "death camp" was safely behind the Iron Curtain, where the truthful Soviet authorities had control of them and all information had to come from them.

But none of this was allowed to be used as a defense by anyone who questioned the NUMBERS, not the existence, that the Holocaust religion requires by law.

One of the big arguments for universalism is how much alike the Great Religions are. But if you recognize the disease of Wordism and you want to get back to actual concepts of Christ or Buddha or Mohammed, these "common" growths of the institutions that grew up in their names if the first thing you must jettison.

As one commenter said, I seem to love Christ and hate Christianity.

I see Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism as Wordist institutions that grew up after Jesus, Buddha and Mohammed. They are, in the worst sense of the word, growths, like cancer.

And they are, indeed, very much alike. The laws that govern the survival of any institution are very much alike. So Christianity was very much at home with Roman slavery and is very much at home with getting rid of the white race today. That's how institutions are.

With long, long Commentaries and so forth what Christ or Buddha actually said becomes incrusted with the same Wordist effluvia.

It is precisely by getting rid of "what the Great Faiths have in common" that one can begin to get back to the message. Wordism is one of our BASICS. Let's USE it.

Europe is very upset that President Bush refuses to adopt their present "center-left" economic policy. Meanwhile, in the period since Europe adopted that policy, European per capita income has dropped twenty percent relative to the United States.

During that same period, Europe has had a permanent recession, while America has had the greatest boom in its history.

Another thing Europe is preaching at Bush about is America's policy on crime. They say our imprisoning more and more repeat felons is evil. Meanwhile, as you may have guessed, the American crime rate has been going down, while that in Europe, once very low, has skyrocketed.

Then there's the idea of a missile defense system. Most Americans are totally unaware that we have no defense whatsoever if any country sends a missile our way. Europe doesn't even want us even to think about having one.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, I am the only person who remembers that this so-called "Star Wars" was the final nail in the coffin of the Soviet Union. Every leftist and every European "ally" BEGGED Reagan to drop his Strategic Defense Initiative. He refused.

Finally, the Soviet Union admitted that "Star Wars" was the final straw that broke its back in the Cold War. They admitted that they could not match the unmatchable technological edge of the United States in space, even with the help of a spy penetration that would have made McCarthy blanch.

That was the reason the USSR threw in the towel on the Cold War.

"Star Wars" worked once, while Europe fought it as frantically as did the USSR. So Europe is once again preaching against it.