September 30, 2026

SHADES OF 9/11: FlyDubai Pilot Attempts Hijacking, Mass Destruction.

Imagine if Flight 93 had had a happy ending. Israel and Saudi Arabia may have just experienced their own version, 25 years later.

The Wall Street Journal reports cautiously on what appears to be a terrorist hijacking over Israel. Their report notes a “struggle” in the cockpit, a steep dive, and an intervention by passengers to resolve it:

Pilots on a FlyDubai flight to Israel were injured after a struggle in the cockpit that sent the plane into a steep dive before it made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

FlyDubai, the sister airline to the long-haul carrier Emirates, didn’t explain what happened in the flight for the Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft, only saying that it “experienced an incident while en route.” Flight FZ1073 landed in Tabuk in western Saudi Arabia and “all passengers are safe and accounted for,” the carrier added.

A statement from the Tabuk airport said “the captain and the co-pilot sustained injuries and were transported to the hospital for necessary medical care.” It did not elaborate on the cause of the injuries.

Itzhak Liber, a person who identified himself on his Facebook page as being a passenger on the flight, said in a video from the plane that an attacker stabbed a pilot. Liber said some on board had stepped in and removed the attacker from the cockpit.

The Times of Israel has a much more robust account of the attempted hijacking. The terrorist turns out to be the FlyDubai co-pilot, hired less than a year earlier, on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv. After stabbing the captain, the co-pilot dove the plane 17,000 feet until passengers breached the cockpit and saved their own lives, not to mention whatever the co-pilot may have aimed the plane at in Saudi Arabia or Israel[.]

More here: Flydubai Co-Pilot Stabs Captain Midair — Israeli Passengers Subdue Him Before the Plane Can Crash.

Not surprisingly, this gentleman is rather elated to have survived:

Posted at 10:35 am by Ed Driscoll

ANALYSIS: TRUE.

The Islamic Republic’s only hope seems to rest with an American political party that always seems to somehow find itself on the other side.

Posted at 10:24 am by Stephen Green

THINK YOU KNOW YOUR BODY: It is astonishingly engineered, but is that by design or by accident? Secrets of the Human Body, Part 1 of 12, today on HillFaith.

Posted at 10:14 am by Mark Tapscott

PERSPECTIVE:

That’s hardly the Miami Vice-scale story the press laid out.

Posted at 9:53 am by Stephen Green

EXERCISE YOUR RIGHTS: Two New Analyses Provide a Clearer Picture of the Almost Half a Billion Guns Americans Own.

The 2026 National Firearms Survey, conducted by Georgetown University professor William English, estimates the private stock includes roughly 208 million handguns, 154 million rifles, and 99 million shotguns. It also estimates that about 32.7 percent of U.S. adults—approximately 88 million people—personally own firearms.

The survey was administered online in July and August to a representative sample of 51,398 U.S. adults. It identified 16,688 internally validated gun owners who completed detailed ownership questions. The average validated gun owner reported owning about 5.2 firearms.

Those estimates aren’t a physical count of every firearm in the country. But a separate analysis by AmmoLand writer Dean Weingarten found that the survey’s breakdown among handguns, rifles, and shotguns closely matches proportions derived from historical federal manufacturing, import, and export records.

That comparison doesn’t independently prove that 461 million firearms currently exist in private hands. It does provide another useful check on whether the survey’s reported mix of firearm types resembles what more than a century of firearms-commerce records would lead researchers to expect.

I suspect perhaps not everyone was completely honest about whether they own any firearms, or how many.

Posted at 9:38 am by Stephen Green

DON SURBER: Carney’s trade war should drive Canadians to drink. “In slapping a retaliatory tariff on us, Mark Carney overlooked the fact that Canada sells 10 times the whiskey to the USA as we do to Canada. . . . We drink 93% of the booze it exports.”

Don’t start an asymmetric contest when you’re on the wrong side of the asymmetry.

Related:

It’s possible he’s not really committed to the best interests of Canada or Canadians.

Posted at 9:02 am by Glenn Reynolds

THE NEW ERA:

Posted at 9:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

SO TRUE:

Much pain and horror could have been avoided if he and Hitler had just been given cushy academic positions. Then they could have terrorized the faculty lounges and no more.

Posted at 8:52 am by Glenn Reynolds

WOW:

Developing story…

Posted at 8:51 am by Stephen Green

PROCEED: SCOTUS Overturns Blockade On Trump’s Third-Country Deportations. “In its unsigned order, the high court granted the Trump administration’s request to pause a ruling issued by Massachusetts-based District Judge Brian Murphy. The Biden appointee’s directive sought to block the government’s deportation of illegal aliens to third countries –countries not of their national origin.”

Posted at 8:36 am by Stephen Green

EVERGREEN: “Democratic women are really the outliers here.”

Posted at 8:35 am by Ed Driscoll

WHAT ELSE ARE THE FOREIGN POLICY GRAYBEARDS MISSING? The Parade of Hormuz Horribles Fizzles Out.

The news out of the Strait of Hormuz is pretty straightforward: The Islamic Republic of Iran has all but lost whatever control it once had over the maritime traffic flowing through that contested choke point. “Middle Eastern crude exports rebounded this month to around their highest level since the war began in February,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Shipments via Hormuz and bypass routes were delivering just under 80% of their prewar regional flows as of last week, according to tracker Kpler.”

That’s just about where the U.S. wants energy exports out of Hormuz to be. After all, the whole point of the blockade is to ensure that Iranian exports never make it to market in the first place. In that sense, U.S. policy in the region has succeeded. Iranian outbound flows are basically at zero.

Since mid-August, the Trump administration has maintained that the blockade, and its efforts to protect shipping through the strait’s southern Omani channel, is bearing fruit. At the time, the claim met with some understandable skepticism. But, as I wrote then, it made sense that the inventories that Trump officials had described were invisible to trackers. They wouldn’t become visible until they’d successfully evaded Iran’s dragnet. Now, six weeks later, “It’s clear that Washington’s figures were substantially correct,” former Bush administration official Michael Allen observed. “As many as 22 million barrels may have passed through the strait in 48 hours over the weekend, compared with about 20 million a day before the war.”

If the community of foreign-policy observers has internalized the news that Iran is losing control of the strait, they have not yet wrangled with the development’s implications. We can speculate about these implications by reviewing the claims made by those who, mere months ago, not only anticipated that Iran’s control of the strait would persist indefinitely but also thought that it represented a greater geostrategic lever for Tehran than even a deployable atomic weapon. . . .

If the sequence of events that these and many, many other foreign-policy analysts forecast over the late spring and summer came to pass, it would represent a strategic disaster for the U.S. But since it hasn’t, what are the consequences?

Don’t rely on the people who got it wrong to tell us.

Posted at 8:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

TWENTY MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE:

Tweet concludes, “We are getting our butt kicked here — companies are refusing cash to stay in Canada now….. and they’re openly violating agreements and just leaving.”

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll

HERE’S HOW THAT SPACE PROGRAM IS COMING ALONG:

Key quote: “The shift is deliberate: commanders would get faster, probabilistic warnings even if the first measurements are less precise, then see the track automatically tighten as more sensor data arrives.”

Posted at 7:49 am by Stephen Green

GREAT MOMENTS IN DOUBLE STANDARDS: Kings reporters caught thirsting over Ben Simmons, Zach LaVine in wild hot-mic moment: ‘I like lightskins.’

New Sacramento Kings guard Ben Simmons and his teammate Zach LaVine received an awkward welcome from several reporters during the team’s media day.

A live stream of the Kings’ press conference caught a few women in the room speaking about the players in between interviews. One reporter was seemingly asking which player had been speaking the podium.

“Ben Simmons. Ben Simmons was, that’s what comes with being Ben Simmons. Cringe. Cringe!” another woman responded.

“He’s lucky he’s so fine,” one reporter said.

“He’s a good looking dude! I didn’t notice, his skin is so smooth. I was like, damn, no tattoos?” said another.

One male reporter said that that former Golden State Warriors guard Jordan Poole was the woman’s type, to which the woman said, “Allegedly, I like lightskins, I guess.”

I’m sure the media would be equally laid back if the genders were reversed:

Posted at 7:45 am by Ed Driscoll

DISPATCHES FROM AL-BRIṬĀNIYĀ: Essex supermarket has sex-segregated checkout lines.

“The scene irritated English people, who say they are now forced to obey the rules of Islamist migrants in their own country.”

Well, I’ve been warning about this for years, but of course, such warnings were “Islamophobic.” In Muslim countries, non-Muslims are expected to conform their behavior to Islamic mores and beliefs. And in non-Muslim countries, non-Muslims are expected to conform their behavior to Islamic mores and beliefs. Especially when that non-Muslim country is quickly becoming a Muslim country.

For those of us on this side of the pond, here’s a nifty primer on UK politics:

> Eventually, we’d had enough.. but there was no other serious movement on the right yet.. so we punished them with a historically low vote, removing them from power.

> This meant the mainstream left wing party won by default. But quickly realised all their ideas had been implemented..

> So now all they do is tinker at the edges and brutally crack down on anyone deemed to be problematic to the race communism revolution / replacement program.

So here we are.. patiently waiting for 2029 for our next vote.. as if in an orderly queue.. with a party in power that is the antithesis of what the majority of British people actually want.

Meanwhile the right is so unbelievably frustrated that it has fractured into 3 parties.

1) the original conservatives “we’re sorry we will definitely lower immigration this time.”

2) Reform : “anyone can be British as long as it’s legal – we just want to grow the economy and stop the illegals.”

3) Restore : “millions must go.”

All the Brits wanted was the nice country they’d always had, but that was too much for their so-called elites to bear.

Posted at 7:34 am by Stephen Green