“An act like that can’t be ignored,” insisted Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Deputy Paul Miller by way of explaining the gang assault, battery, and arrest of 74-year-old Holocaust survivor Elena Reichman at the Palm Beach International Airport. “A Deputy is responsible to take action when she is assaulted and battered by anyone, and [Deputy Margaret Piscerno] took the appropriate action.”

To what “act” did Deputy Miller refer?

According to Piscerno’s account, the elderly Reichman, who spent four years in a Nazi labor camp as a young girl, “pushed” her during an intimate security screening. Reichman, who was attempting to visit her children in New York for Passover, set off a metal detector and was singled out for special screening. When the TSA’s designated groper announced her intention to “wand” the grandmother, Reichman became agitated, and started “screaming.”

Piscerno insisted that Reichman “lower her voice.”

Indeed: We can’t have a Holocaust survivor’s voice wake up the torpid sheep about our nation’s accelerating descent into unalloyed totalitarianism.

Reichman explained that she had a wad of cash safety-pinned to the inside of her pants, and that complying with an order to take out the pin would mean “I would have to take my pants halfway off to take out the pins.” At some point she grew weary of Piscerno’s ministrations and — according to the arrest report — “shoved” the deputy.

Bear in mind, we’re talking about a 5’1″, 74-year-old woman with a heart condition and diabetes who has visible difficulty walking.

It’s quite likely that Reichman, who has a more acute sense of encroaching tyranny — and a lower threshold of outrage when dealing with personal indignities — than most TV-anesthetized Americans, reacted reflexively to an invasive search of her person.

In a free society, acting on that impulse is understood as an appropriate assertion of individual autonomy. Where we live now, it’s called “felony battery on a law enforcement officer.”

This is the third instance of which I’m aware involving an elderly woman being arrested in airports and charged with various supposed offenses for resisting invasive searches.

About four years ago, Phyllis Dintenfass of Appleton, Wisconsin was charged with assault on a federal officer following an incident in the nearby Outagamie Regional Airport. Dintenfass, a grandmother who was 62 at the time, was selected for “secondary screening,” which meant that she was taken behind a curtain and given a thorough palpation by a female TSA official named Anita Gostisha. This involved the TSA official using the back of her hands to check the area beneath Dintenfass’s breasts — which prompted the outraged passenger to exclaim, “How would you like it if I did this to you?”

When the TSA agent fondled Dintenfass, it was called a “security screening”; when Dintenfass reciprocated the gesture, it was called “felonious assault.” She was eventually convicted of that offense by a federal jury and given one year of probation and 100 hours of community service.

Federal prosecutor Tim Funnell complained that by mimicking the actions of the TSA tax-feeder, Mrs. Dintenfass “punished Anita Gostisha for doing her job.” U.S. Attorney Steven Bispukic added that TSA officers are “entitled to protection from assault.”

What this means, of course, is that the familiar grope-and-frisk-and-wand routine to which most air travelers dutifully submit is a form of “punishment” and “assault.” Unless, of course, we are to believe that those wearing Regime-distributed costumes are sanctified personages whose bodies cannot be defiled by contact with mundanes like thee and me.

Oh, now I get it: That’s the real reason the TSA chair-moisteners wear those rubber gloves!

About two years ago, Janet Gregory (69 at the time) was flying from Cleveland to Florida to visit grandchildren. During the first leg of her trip she took out a bottle of nail polish — a (voice of chastened reverence for the State’s arbitrary edicts) forbidden item — and began decorating her nails. She ignored a flight attendants demand to surrender the nail polish.

Somehow, despite this act of terrorist-supporting rebellion, the plane landed safely, and after she left the plane Mrs. Gregory was quickly surrounded by a thugswarm.

As she was dragged away kicking and screaming, Janet made unpleasant — and perhaps unintended — contact with one of her abductors. Which meant, of course, that she was charged with assault (in addition to “communicating threats” and the all-purpose tack-on charge of “resisting arrest”).

When a grandmother is molested at a checkpoint, it’s standard procedure — but woe betide the grandmother who dares put up what meager and half-hearted resistance she can. Turning traumatized geriatric women into “violent felons” displays one facet of the perverse genius of the Homeland Security State.

You see, from the Leviathan’s point of view, only those employed to make or enforce policy are really persons; the rest of us are people.

If this distinction is difficult to understand, then consider the wisdom shared in (of all things) the 1960 Jerry Lewis film Cinderfella. Early in the story, Lewis’s character receives a visit from his Fairy Godfather (look, that’s what he was called in the movie), played by the always delightful Ed Wynn. Cinderfella makes a remark to the effect that he’s always tried to be nice to “people and persons.” Asked to elaborate, Lewis’s character explains that only a chosen few are sufficiently important to be considered individual persons; the rest of us are people.

We’re constantly told that in our Grand and Glorious Democracy, the people rule. The truth is that the people are an undifferentiated mass of subjects; it is the persons who bear rule. We The People are not the actors, but the acted upon. When one of us acts on the idea that he or she is a person, that renegade can expect swift and severe chastisement of some kind.

In fact, the Homeland Security Apparatus is now prepared to act on the claim that our very genetic material is the collective property of society, requiring us to surrender DNA samples whenever a pretext can be found. (This opens up all kinds of possible mischief, beginning with the claim, recently upheld in New York, that genetic evidence is sufficient grounds for a criminal indictment.) The same is true of other individual biometric signifiers, such as fingerprints. Commissar for Homeland Security Mikhail Chernoff — who received his post at Homeland Security after helping to build the Regime’s torture apparatus — insists that fingerprints are not “personal data,” and thus can be collected by the Regime and shared with other national security systems as our rulers see fit.

And this brings us, once again, to the ongoing atrocity being committed by the Texas state government against the mothers and children of the FLDS sect.

Is it the Redneck Militia? No — It’s the Midland County Sheriff’s Department SWAT team, who — from the looks of the carbohydrate sculpture in the right-hand corner (Chris Farley Lives!) — found an outfitter who stocks XXXXXXL-size BDU pants. Da Boyz were just chillin’ and posin’ a little after the raid on the YFZ Ranch in El Dorado, Texas.

The 437 kidnapped children, and more than 100 detained mothers, are being compelled to undergo DNA testing — despite the fact that not a single one of them has been accused of a crime. Barbara Walther, the same judge who authorized that outrage, ruled yesterday that FLDS mothers of nursing children would not be permitted to breastfeed their infants.

After all, sniffed the judge with the refined disdain persons so often display when dealing with mere people, “every day in this country, we have mothers who go back to work after six weeks of maternity leave.”

That the mothers mentioned in that example were not compelled to abandon their six-week-old children, but rather chose for some reason to do so, matters not at all. It’s good enough for some of the people, so why should the FLDS women assume they’re special enough to care for their own children, rather than entrusting them to hired strangers?

Lavishing such individualized attention on a youngster is unhealthy, after all. If he’s fed, raised, educated, and cared for by his own parents, he won’t be properly socialized; that is to say, he won’t be taught to think of himself as part of the people. Why, a child in such circumstances tends to think of himself as a person without being given permission to do so.

It was attitudes of that sort that inspired the militant grannies mentioned above to attack our heroic Homeland Security personnel. Good heavens, were this type of attitude to go viral, the result would be an epidemic of militancy! No public servant would ever be safe!

May God hasten that day.

UPDATE

Deseret News photo

Yesterday, in a scene of unfathomable cruelty, about 100 FLDS children were loaded on to buses with tinted windows and taken from their temporary prison. Many of them were seen “jumping excitedly in their seats and waving to the people outside,” most likely because they believed they were headed home.

In fact, the kidnappers of those children were beginning the process of redistributing the captives to foster homes scattered across Texas.

Imagine, for a second, the clinical indifference to the suffering of children that one must display in order to do such a thing to innocent children kept ignorant of their fate. And then ask yourself
how, in the name of anything anybody considers holy, can any rational human being — any intelligent person — look upon the government ruling us as anything other than our implacably evil enemy.

Deseret News photo

Ah, but such an attitude is a symptom of cult-like tendencies. We “know” this because, as the Salt Lake Tribune reports this morning, a “Cultural Competencies” tip sheet prepared for Texas officials working with the stolen FLDS children warned that members of that sect would be (in the Tribune’s paraphrase) “fearful, self-destructive and distrustful of government.”

Bear in mind that we’re talking about a government that — without a legally defensible rationale — had dispatched a heavily-armed party of raiders to surround their property and abduct their children.

Why on earth would anybody be “distrustful” toward people who would seize his children at gunpoint?

Oh, but I see I’ve got the categories wrong: It was the officially recognized persons who committed those acts, so the people belonging to the FLDS church had no right to complain, and were obligated to display child-like trust and canine submissiveness.

Second Update: The Feds Smell An Opportunity….

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Mormon who almost certainly has polygamous ancestors, has renewed his request of the Attorney General to launch a federal campaign against Mormon fundamentalists (and, most like, Christian and Muslim splinter sects that practice polygyny).

“The recent raid of one polygamist compound in Texas uncovered many of the problems,” stated Reid’s letter. “But Texas may be the tip of the iceberg. The existence of such communities elsewhere in the United States is well known.”

What has been “uncovered” in Texas is the utter cynicism and corruption of that state’s government. As of yet no evidence of any kind of abuse has been presented. The “victim” has been exposed as a deranged fraud artist, the purported suspect was interviewed at the side of the road by the Texas Rangers and dismissed without ever being taken into custody.

If the situation at El Dorado is to be taken as representative, the problem cited by Reid would appear to be all tip and no iceberg. Of course, the FLDS — who have distinguished themselves for their docility — are not the only Mormon splinter group around.

“Federal assistance is vital,” simpered Reid in his personal note to Michael Mukasey, since local governments in some communities are reportedly dominated by polygamists. (This is certainly true of Hildale/Colorado City, and this is a result of the active connivance of two state governments and the Feds in subsidizing the FLDS-ruled city-state.)

Reid is exactly the kind of soul-dead power junkie who is willing to sacrifice any number of people — including his own people — in order to distinguish himself among the ruling “persons.”

On sale now!

Dum spiro, pugno!