Accused flydubai hijacker celebrated beating women, Sharia law
This story raises questions about governance, accountability, and American values.
The man accused of hijacking that flydubai flight spent years taking a UK university course from afar while apparently posting about how much he enjoyed beating women and enforcing Sharia law. Buckinghamshire New University was teaching him aviation management. He was learning how to run an airline and apparently signaling a worldview that treats half the population as property.
New Republican Times Editorial Board
The accused flydubai hijacker touted violence against women and expressed hate for Jews and gay people in sickening newly revealed social media posts he made while studying to be a pilot – before he went on to allegedly attack his captain with a crash axe and attempt to down a plane.
Hamam al-Hammami, 29, allegedly made the series of extreme posts while he was studying aviation management remotely at Buckinghamshire New University in the UK, the Telegraph reported. In one exchange with a woman, he allegedly said, “I’d stomp on your head, wipe the floor with you, make you an example to others, and then divorce you,” the outlet reported, following an analysis of more than 2,000 posts published between November 2021 and August 2022 by an X account believed to be al-Hammami’s.
In another reply to a discussion about men attacking women, al-Hammami reportedly said, “He gave her a preemptive slap so she would redefine her boundaries, just as Russia slapped Ukraine to adjust its borders.” During the same exchange, al-Hammami reportedly posted that if a woman “so much as breathed” around a man, he should “stomp on her head,” according to reports.
Here’s the latest on the Israel-bound plane suspected terror attack: Other posts called for severe Islamic punishments against Jews and homosexuals, according to the report. “His social media accounts [say] clearly that he has been radicalized into jihadist ideology.
He talks about killing Jews,” an Israeli official told the Times of Israel on Thursday. Al-Hammami, an Omani national, allegedly stabbed the flight’s captain , Smit Machchhar, in the cockpit with crash ax and tried to take control of the plane in a “terrorist attack” Wednesday.
His actions nearly crashed the flight with 182 people on board before passengers rushed in and subdued him.
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New Republican Times Editorial Board
The man accused of hijacking that flydubai flight spent years taking a UK university course from afar while apparently posting about how much he enjoyed beating women and enforcing Sharia law. Buckinghamshire New University was teaching him aviation management. He was learning how to run an airline and apparently signaling a worldview that treats half the population as property. Nobody in the British higher education system thought to flag any of it.
That is the part worth stopping on. Not the hijacking itself, though that is bad enough. The fact that a guy openly celebrating misogyny and religious law could earn a degree from a British institution without raising a single alarm tells you everything about how hollow our safeguarding has become. Remote learning means he never had to sit in a classroom or look a professor in the eye. But the posts were public. They were extreme. Someone had to see them. The question is whether anyone cared.
The university says it takes such matters seriously, which is what they always say after the fact. The real lesson is simpler: we keep assuming the niceties of Western education civilize people. They don't. A diploma from a British university does not overwrite an ideology that celebrates violence. It just gives that ideology a better resume.
Screen people for what they actually say, not where they studied. The UK let this man slip through because it was checking boxes, not reading his words. And now an airline crew had to deal with the consequences of that negligence. We ought to stop pretending this is an isolated case. It is the pattern.
Commentary written with AI assistance by the New Republican Times Editorial Board.