Canto I
Picture if you will, our heroine, Ms Annie Jacobsen, security mom and internet marketer extraordinaire, there in the airport, with spouse and child, a family outing.
When Suddenly ( foreboding chords in E minor augmented. Or something) there they are – Middle Eastern Men!
Not one, not two, or even three, which would be harrowing enough for any right-thinking Amrikan air traveller, but 14, count em 14! Middle Eastern Men!
Dressed in shirts with – horror of horrors – Arabic WRITING – on them! Talking to each other! Going to the bathroom!
In the proud tradition of Patriot Eunice Stone, Annie wasted no time in alerting airline personnel to the imminent threat present in the aircraft, and those urinating, shirts with Arabic writing wearing, McDonalds eating suspected potential sympathizers with pre-terror profile causes got to find out first hand that Amrikans are Resolved. In a Heightened State of Alert. Unspoken Orange.
Like a smoothly oiled machine, the brave heroes of Amrika’s first line of defense against alarming proximity to Muslims went into action. Miss Annie’s 14 worst nightmares were questioned, and determined to be musicians on their way to a gig.
A likely story, hmmmphed Miss Annie, and stalked off, still trembling with fear to write it all down for the Internet, where it was immediately scooped up and batted around from blog to blog to email lists and message boards, and commented on at length by righteously indignant Americans, musicians, hmm, since when does Syria have musicians? And didn’t the President, George “God Speaks Through Me” Bush say Syria was going to be added to the Axis of Evil? well, there you go. They were on that plane having a dry run of a terror attack. That’s why they went to the bathroom one by one, they were building a bomb in there, a secret one, each one only knew how to build his part, so if they got caught, even when they tortured their families they wouldn’t be able to reveal the plan, if they had all been rounded up 3 years ago this wouldn’t have happened to poor Miss Annie, how dare you call her a racist? Why don’t you go live in Iraq then, you are with us or you are with the terrorists, how do we know you’re not? Do you play a musical instrument? I didn’t think they were allowed to have music, doesn’t it say that in the Koran, right before the part where it says they have to hate America?
So spake the Voice of the Internet
And then Salon picked it up, and the next thing you know there’s Annie right there on Crusade News Network being interviewed by none other than the mumbling Goebbelist himself Aaron Brown. Or one of them, they all blur.
Why?
As Salon pointed out, Miss Annie’s story is a tale of nothing happened. She was on a plane with a band. She got off the plane with her family and proceeded on to her destination, the band went on to play its gig.
In follow-ups to the story, Miss Annie revealed that she “exchanged pleasantries” with one of the Middle Eastern Men, and it was after he failed to return her smile once on the airplane that she notified flight attendants of her state of terror.
So what’s up with all this? Is Miss Annie a viral, an operative of some kind, charged with the task of further popularizing the idea of locking up everybody with a “Middle Eastern Appearance?” That seems to be gaining popularity enough on its own without the need to put poor Miss Annie through all that typing.
Or is it just an indication of the preponderance of nutcases on airplanes and the Internet?
Or a little bit of both?
Miss Annie hyperventilates. You decide.
Meanwhile, Miss Annie, in case you’re lurking on here, here are some links for you to check out…
http://www.almazaj.com/WMCshop.cgi?action=dbview&id=TMP1210
http://www.aramusic.com/htmls/voice037.htm
http://hometown.aol.com/musicaxis/mehana.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~
Canto II
Miss Annie Still Obsessed with Handsome Young Syrian Who Didn’t Smile Back
A little background… One day Miss Annie and her family got on the same plane with Nour Mehana and his band.
…”I noticed some of the passengers paying attention to the the situation as well,” she recalled later. “As boarding continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Middle Eastern men made eye contact. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my husband was beginning to feel anxious.”….
Trying to reassure herself and her husband Kevin, Mrs Jacobsen walked past one of the men, with whom she had exchanged a few friendly words in the terminal. Making eye contact, she smiled. “The man did not smile back. His face did not move,” she said. “In fact, the cold defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine.”
That was enough for her husband. Marching into first class, he approached a flight attendant and told her: “I might be overreacting, but I’ve been watching some really suspicious things.”…
She blogged about it, Salon picked it up, She got on CNN 10 o’clock news.
I blogged about it. She got on Snopes.
And today, guess what? Miss Annie just can’t seem to move on. She has been hypnotized by her brief encounter with the young dark-eyed musician..
This is Part V of the ongoing series entitled “Terror in the Skies,
Again?”
A few days ago, WomensWallStreet.com received an important email. It
was from Billie Jo Rodriguez, another passenger who was on Northwest Airlines
flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on June 29. Billie Jo is a
Certified Public Accountant living in Oxnard, California. She had some
additional, disturbing information about flight 327 that she felt someone needed
to know. She had been so terrified by what happened on the flight that she sent
two emails to the Department of Homeland Security telling them about the
experience, but she hadn’t heard back from them. Then, through a series of
events, she heard about my article, “Terror in the Skies, Again?” She and I have
had numerous conversations and she is willing to share her story on the record.
The following interview is based on conversations Billie Jo and I have had, as
well as a discussion she had with my editor.
ANNIE: Where were you sitting on flight 327?
BILLIE JO: I was in seat
21-C. Three of the Middle Eastern men were sitting right near me — the man in
the jogging suit [with Arabic writing] was in the aisle seat right behind me
(22C), another man from the group sat right next to me (21-B) and another man
from the group sat one row in front of me (20-E).
ANNIE: Tell me what the men were doing that was out of the
ordinary?
BILLIE JO: It was when we were up in the air and they started
walking up and down the aisles. And the eye contact. The thing that really got
me was the eye contact. It was so subtle. If you know somebody, you look at
them. You nod your head. That’s not what these guys were doing. They were doing
these little looks and head signals — acknowledging each other and yet
pretending not to know each other.
Then the guy next to me was pretending to be sleeping. But when people
sleep, you know, they breathe deeply. This guy was pretending to sleep. They
were all doing this little eye thing, and this little head thing. A couple of
the other guys were going up and down the aisles looking at each other, making
those head signals. They were signaling to each other, that was really freaky.
ANNIE: Tell me what else you saw.
BILLIE JO: I noticed the McDonald’s
bag right away. It was so big and I thought, how many burgers does he have in
there? It was weird. And I noticed the man with the limp — it was more than a
limp. It was a dragging of the foot.
I also have to tell you one detail that you didn’t catch. I emailed this
detail to the Department of Homeland Security but I haven’t heard back. As I
mentioned, the tall man in the jogging suit sat right behind me. He got up and
passed by me to go to the bathroom up in first class. (Note to readers: This is
the same man that, according to a first class passenger, pushed another
passenger out of the way to get into the lavatory first. This is also the man
mentioned in a TIME magazine article who spent 10 minutes in the bathroom, which
alarmed a Federal Air Marshal who then searched the lavatory).
The man was gone for a very long time. And when he came back, he reeked of
chemicals — the chemicals from the toilet bowl. He absolutely reeked of
it. And I thought, what was he doing in the toilet? He didn’t smell like
chemicals when he got up to go to the bathroom — it was when he came back. It
was so spooky. What was he doing in there? That he would smell so strong of
chemicals from the toilet?
Please Nour. Send the poor lady a CD, a t-shirt, a photo of you smiling…