"Terror", My Judgement

Last night on ARD (8:15) they ran "Terror, Your Judgement".  It was a 90-minute theater-like fictional piece where a Jihad-like character had taken over a German passenger plane, and was taking 160-odd passengers toward a soccer stadium with 70,000 fans sitting there.  A fighter jet was sent and had roughly a minute to assess things, and eventually the Captain on the fighter jet made the decision to shoot down the passenger jet.  A court hearing (which is what the whole 90 minutes took up) was to assess innocence or possible guilt of murder charges (160-plus dead).

I tuned in at the 9:00 point.....having spent three hours hanging wall-paper.

Bluntly, it would have taken me 10 seconds to make the same decision as the fighter-pilot.

So after this show ended, there is a vote opportunity.  You call in and vote.  Naturally my spend-thrift wife dictated in strong terms....that I couldn't vote (I think it would have been a 50-cent vote).  I would have voted 'not-guilty'.

But then came the second show.....Hart Aber Fair....where they discussed the matter with a political figure, a retired chief prosecutor, a theologian, and a retired fighter pilot.

Buried in the Basic Law, the German Constitution, is a statement that all people are entitled to life, period, no exception.

So the retired chief prosecutor went with the guilty view, and hyped that for the whole hour.  You can't get around this statement of all people entitled to life.  There is no waiver or by-pass.  Course, once they crashed into the stadium and killed the 70,000.....well....they were entitled to life to and how avoiding the take-down of the passenger jet is beyond me.

The vote?  Roughly 87-percent of Germans voted "not guilty".  Course, you have to factor in that probably few if any people under the age of 25 watched the movie or voted.  You also have to ask how many Germans watched this odd movie.  My humble guess is roughly 1 to 2 million, and then you have to ask how many actually voted, or how many were in spend-thrift homes (like me).  Maybe this entire vote is based on 80,000 people total.....you just don't know.

I should note this as well (which isn't much of a shock).....this morning, lots of people were noted in complaining that the call-in connection or vote-capability was over-whelmed and did NOT function perfectly.  So the vote?  Well....it might have gone higher or lower.....but again, you just don't know.

I came to three conclusions by the end.

1.  This was created as an intellectual tool to introduce the topic to the public and let them participate in the judgement call.  Maybe it's just me, but why not allow other topics to be used as well.....oh....well.....like integration, over-spending by governments, state-run television, taxation, etc.  But I guess I'd be opening up a Pandora's Box.

2.  The Jihad-guy who triggered this fantasy airline disaster?  Never for a single minute on trial.  It was very obvious that they didn't want to discuss much of him, or how he took the plane, or his beliefs.  He's the one that should have been in the hot-seat.

3.  The Spock Rule is the bottom line: "The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few".  You can value the lives of the 160-odd people on the plane, but their situation is determined by a crazed-half-wit Jihadist with no appreciation of life, the Basic Law, or human dignity.