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The timing couldn’t have been better. Just days after the hapless Democrats accused President Bush of fear mongering a man was arrested at the Tampa airport trying to sneak a box cutter on board a flight to Vegas.

About 7:30 a.m. Sunday, airport security ran Benjamin Baines Jr.’s backpack through an X-ray machine and saw the image of a box cutter, according to a report from the Transportation Security Administration.

When searching the backpack, a security officer found a book titled “Fear Itself.” The book was hollowed out, and the box cutter was inside.

After Baines was read his rights, he said his cousin had cut away the pages to make the hollow section in the book. Later, reports state, he said he had hollowed it out himself to hide money and marijuana from his roommates.

Baines told officers he was moving to Las Vegas and forgot the cutter was in the book.

Officers found books in the backpack titled “Muhammad in the Bible,” “The Prophet’s Prayer” and “The Noble Qur’an.” He also had a copy of the Quran and the Bible.

Several sheets of paper in the backpack included rap lyrics that referred to police, narcotics, weapons and killing. Baines told officers he is a rapper who writes his own lyrics and that rap music writers need to “play the part,” the report states.

Meanwhile “smart guys” in the media are giving a platform to radical jihadists so they can state that Americans are bigoted and racist. Get this, Hussein Ibish, founder of the Foundation for Arab-American Leadership in Washington, D.C. was paraphrased in the USA Today as saying that “American culture’s view of American Muslims and Islam is steadily deteriorating under an onslaught of “bigotry” on cable news shows, newspaper op-ed pages and in the blogosphere“.

On March 25, 2002 Daniel Pipes wrote the following about Ibish: (h/t Michelle Malkin)

Unlike most of today’s prominent Muslim spokesmen, the 38-year-old Ibish does not advocate militant Islam. Instead, he pushes a set of far left-wing views. These start, not surprisingly, with a deep antagonism to the U.S. government. An immigrant from Lebanon, he believes Washington has imperial ambitions in the Middle East. To achieve these, he says, Washington relies extensively on terrorism.

First, it has stitched together a system of puppet rulers who “terrorize the region.” Second, it “has the ability to murder and rampage at will” and sometimes does just that - as during its “terrorist” 1986 air strike against Libya.

It gets worse. Ibish has described former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “vermin.” He has compared comments by Colin Powell about Iraqi civilian deaths during the 1991 war to those by Timothy McVeigh about the children he murdered in Oklahoma City. He may be tough on American diplomats, but for the second-worst mass murderer of the 20th-century, China’s Mao Zedong, Ibish shows a touching affection (”The achievements of Mao can hardly be overstated.”)

Ibish apologizes for many groups the U.S. government deems terrorist, starting with Osama bin Laden. “I’m skeptical,” was his reaction after a federal grand jury indicted bin Laden for bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa. Ibish dismisses bin Laden as a blowhard who gives “blood-curdling interviews,” a guy who “lives in a cave in Afghanistan” and someone seen by Arabs as “a crank and a dangerous fanatic.”

The list of apologetics goes on. President Bush calls Hamas “one of the deadliest terrorist organizations in the world today” but our lobbyist friend touts its accomplishments “running hospitals and schools and orphanages.”

Pipes ended his article with “Anti-American, anti-Semitic, inaccurate and immoral; Hussein Ibish makes for a peculiar choice to serve as the public face of Arab-Americans.”

Thanks to the idiots in the MSM some things never change; and they never will as long as people keep looking to the MSM for accurate, unbiased information.

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