Plane nearly crashed and then the narrative took over

Something deeply disturbing about the reaction to the flydubai Flight FZ1073 incident has surprisingly little to do with the aircraft itself. The aircraft, after all, appears to have behaved exactly as the available evidence says it did. The people watching the story immediately began doing ideological gymnastics. A Boeing 737 carrying 174 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv experienced a violent cockpit incident.

The Omani co-pilot allegedly stabbed the Indian captain; the aircraft plunged almost 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds; an emergency was declared; passengers entered the cockpit; and the aircraft was eventually brought under control and diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Captain Smit Machchhar was seriously injured and required surgery. Two other pilots travelling as passengers helped land the aircraft safely. The UAE has now opened an investigation into what happened and whether terrorism or prior planning was involved.

These are not Israeli fantasies. The flight path can be independently reconstructed, the aircraft landed in Saudi Arabia, the injured Indian captain exists, the airline exists, the passengers exist, and the emergency happened. Yet almost before the aircraft had stopped smoking metaphorically, the conspiracy theorists had boarded. Apparently, the fact that an Israeli passenger helped save the aircraft is suspicious. The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu subsequently met him is suspicious, and the fact that the passenger said he remembered something from watching Air Crash Investigation is apparently suspicious enough to make Mossad look like a bunch of amateurs writing scripts for a particularly desperate Netflix thriller.

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The passenger's story is certainly extraordinary. Yaniv Hayoun, who was not a pilot, reportedly entered the cockpit during the struggle and briefly pulled the controls back after remembering what he had seen in an aviation documentary. Qualified pilots then took over. The story has been independently reported. Extraordinary, yes, but evidence of a staged Israeli operation, no.

There is, however, a genuinely serious question here which deserves considerably more attention than the conspiracy theories. Why was an Omani national operating as co-pilot on an Israel-bound flight if, as Israeli authorities contend, the relevant aviation arrangements restrict the nationality of pilots operating such routes? That is a legitimate security and regulatory question that should be investigated thoroughly, and if the system failed, somebody should explain why. But an unexplained security failure is not automatically evidence of a conspiracy.

Bureaucracies fail, and security systems fail, and airlines can make mistakes. Occasionally, people who should never have passed through a security system do. That is precisely why investigations exist. Another distinction seems to have disappeared from public discourse. Questioning Israel's account of the motive is legitimate, but declaring the entire incident fabricated is something else. Israeli officials have said that the Omani co-pilot underwent Islamist radicalisation and intended to crash the aircraft. That remains an allegation under investigation, rather than an established judicial finding. The UAE is investigating the incident separately. So let us wait for the evidence. But let us also stop pretending that the religious dimension of Islamist terrorism is somehow an embarrassing hallucination that respectable people must politely ignore.

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The existence of violent passages in Islamic scripture is not controversial. Nor is the fact that jihadist organisations have repeatedly used Qur'anic verses, hadith and Islamic jurisprudence to justify terrorism. The intellectually serious question is not whether such texts exist. They plainly do. The question is how particular Muslims, movements and political organisations interpret them. And here the evidence is considerably more complicated than either camp would like. Pew's 2017 survey of American Muslims found that 76 per cent said targeting and killing civilians for political, social or religious purposes was never justified, while another 8 per cent said it was rarely justified. Twelve per cent said it could sometimes or often be justified, although Pew cautioned that some respondents were thinking about military action or self-defence rather than terrorism. That means the proposition that Muslims in the West are secretly waiting for the next terrorist attack is unsupported.

But neither does it follow that religious authoritarianism is imaginary. Pew's much larger survey of Muslims in 39 countries found substantial support in some societies for making sharia the law of the land and, among those supporting sharia, for severe punishments including the execution of apostates. The figures for apostasy were extraordinarily high in some countries, including 86 per cent among sharia supporters in Egypt, 82 per cent in Jordan, 79 per cent in Afghanistan and 76 per cent in Pakistan. That is not evidence that Muslims generally support terrorism, but it is certainly evidence that religious authoritarianism and the coercive interpretation of religious law are legitimate subjects for serious discussion.

And this is where the Samuel Paty case becomes so important. A man was beheaded because he had shown caricatures of Muhammad in a lesson concerning freedom of expression. One can regard the cartoons as crude, offensive, tasteless, or deliberately provocative. What one cannot do in a liberal democracy is turn religious offence into a licence for violence. The sentence "He should not have been killed, but he should not have shown the cartoon" sounds moderate until one asks the obvious question. Who gets to decide what somebody is allowed to draw, write, publish or say? If the answer is "the religiously offended", then freedom of expression has already been surrendered.

That is not an argument against Muslims. It argues against religious coercion. It applies equally to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and every other belief system. No prophet, scripture or deity should acquire a veto over another human being's freedom merely because somebody regards the subject as sacred. And that is where some Western commentary becomes strangely selective. There is often an understandable eagerness to examine colonialism, racism, poverty, discrimination and Western foreign policy when explaining Islamist violence. Those factors may matter, but when the perpetrator himself invokes religious doctrine, pretending that the doctrine is merely an ornamental afterthought is not analysis, but avoidance. The opposite mistake is just as foolish.

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Islam is not synonymous with jihadism, and Muslims cannot sensibly be treated as a single ideological bloc. Most Muslims, including American Muslims, reject terrorism, and many Muslims themselves have been among the principal victims of jihadist organisations. The answer, therefore, is neither romanticising Islam nor demonising Muslims. It is taking ideology seriously.

The same principle should apply to Iran. One can condemn American or Israeli military action while simultaneously recognising that the Islamic Republic has an extensive record of repression and that many Iranians themselves have fought against its religious authoritarianism. Opposing one government's actions does not require sanctifying its adversary. That is the peculiar intellectual contortion we keep witnessing. Israel can be wrong without every Israeli account being fabricated. America can be wrong without Iran becoming a peaceful liberal democracy. Muslims can be peaceful without every Islamic doctrine becoming immune from criticism. And Flight FZ1073 should ultimately be judged in precisely that spirit.

Find out why an Omani national was permitted into that cockpit. Find out what happened between the two pilots, and find out whether radicalisation was involved. Find out whether there was an attempted deliberate crash, and find out whether the airline or the security authorities failed. And if the evidence ultimately contradicts the Israeli government's interpretation, say so. But if the evidence establishes an Islamist attack, then say that too. The answer to propaganda is not counter-propaganda. It is evidence. The plane nearly fell out of the sky because something went catastrophically wrong in its cockpit. The discussion afterwards nearly did the same thing because far too many people grabbed the controls before looking at the instruments.

(The author is a National Award winner for Best Narration and an independent political analyst. Views expressed are personal.)