China Droll

So, another shoe-bomber has appeared, this time thigh bomber Muslim terrorist Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a rich banker’s son from Nigeria, whose, wait for this: Own father had warned the authorities about his son’s increasingly scary “religious” behaviour.

The authorities, meanwhile, didn’t see this as reason enough to put him on a no-fly list, although they had already had him in their sights before the father had warned them, and he was allowed to board the plane from Amsterdam with a lethal concoction strapped to his thigh while all around him non-Muslim passengers were stripped of their little bottles of shampoo, hair-gel and mineral water.

Charming! Air flight is getting more and more attractive, wouldn’t you say?

Meanwhile I’ve noticed, on the two occasions I’ve been flying this year, that the security personnel in airports seem to consist almost purely of persons of - Oh! “Middle-Eastern appearance.”

We can’t say Muslims, can we? No. And not all people of middle-eastern appearance are Muslims, to be sure. But there certainly are a lot of them working in airports, taking bottled water away from people.

Would it be an enormously huge leap of the imagination to perhaps think that one, just one of these people in charge of security at airports could possibly be someone not with the passengers’ best interest in mind but on the contrary let through people with less innocent substances on their persons than shampoo?

Just a thought. Meanwhile, the train is cheaper, better for the environment and - at least in China - has far better security than, apparently, that of European and American planes …