UAE investigators say flydubai FZ1073’s co-pilot attacked his captain with the crash axe on September 30 before passengers stopped him. On October 9, The Daily Wire asked: “Can We Still Fly Safely With Muslims?” Six words, and one of them is a faith. In every account the accused is one man: Khaleej Times calls him “the co-pilot”, The Times of Israel “the Omani copilot”. The Daily Wire’s headline leaves him out. It moves the act from the man with the axe to everyone who shares a religion with him, and it does so as a question, so nothing is claimed and the claim lands anyway. The tell: a group named where one person acted. The page argues with its own headline. The third and fourth paragraphs answer “It’s complicated” and “Yes, we can, with the many Muslim pilots”. The seventh says those who damage Muslims most are “those who insist on turning a faith into a global threat profile.” The fifth brings in a United pilot of whom “no one alleges that he has harmed anyone”, a man set beside an attack he had no part in. A reader who stops at the headline keeps the question and never meets the answer. Beside the other headlines, the choice shows. Arabian Business names the co-pilot. The Times of Israel and JNS put “six” in their headlines, the passengers who stopped him. The Irish Independent leads with a doctor warning against generalising. Those sentences carry a person and a number; the specimen carries a people. Answering by faith before investigators have answered at all hands a ready argument to anyone who wants travelers screened by religion, whatever the author meant by it.
