Published on January 25, 2010
Safeguard Safety in the Skies:
Expand Terrorist ‘No-Fly’ List
To make Americans safer from terrorist attacks aimed at aviation, the national no-fly list needs to be expanded dramatically.
So say the top executives of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization with more than 400,000 member families in the U.S.
“Six-and-a-half decades after the Holocaust, there are 50,000 Nazis on the Justice Department’s watch list,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Los Angeles-based institution. “How can there be only 3,400 identifiable terrorists on the Homeland Security watchlist?”
Both Hier and fellow rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center, sent a letter to U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano...
urging her to add thousands of names to the no-fly list. They would include members and enablers of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jemmah Islamiyah, and other groups branded as terrorists by the State Department and European Union.
Specific names recommended for the no-fly list by the Wiesenthal Center leaders include London-based al-Qaeda recruiter Omar Bakri Muhammad, Jordanian jihad advocate Ibrahim Zayd, and Yemen-based Anwar al-Walaki, spiritual mentor of the failed underwear bomber as well as the perpetrator of the Fort Hood massacre.
The rabbis concluded that the aviation safety of Americans supersedes foreign policy concerns that have thus far restricted the war on terrorism to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is named for the Austrian architect who, after surviving the Holocaust, dedicated his life to hunting Nazi war criminals.
