House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA) said today that the U.S. should follow Israeli airline El-Al’s example since “there is not a passenger that boards those planes that they don’t know everything possible about. And that’s what we gotta do.”
On Fox News today, Cantor pointed out that “anybody who has traveled lately knows how nonsensical some of the things you have to go through are if we are fighting a war on terror. Why does somebody like Joan Rivers get thrown off a plane, when we’ve got terrorists riding these planes?”
Cantor is referring to a January 6 incident where comedienne Rivers was prevented from boarding a plane to Newark Airport, because her passport had two names on it (“Joan Rivers” is not her birth name).
He continued that “if anybody’s flown El-Al lately, look at what they do. There is not a passenger that boards those planes that they don’t know everything possible about. And that’s what we gotta do.”
But of course, Cantor only wants to know everything about certain types of people, asking
“who’s the problem here?”
“I am talking about knowing where the problem comes from,” he said, “and addressing it by focusing on the threat.”
