Yesterday was the eighty-sixth anniversary of the Vichy Statute, in which French authorities sealed the fate of the Jews in their jurisdiction.
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The Statut des Juifs was adopted by Marshal Pétain’s cabinet in the unoccupied zone in Vichy. This half of France still had a French government, and they published it in the Journal Officiel like any other statute.
The statute defined a Jew: three grandparents “of the Jewish race,” or two if the spouse was Jewish. Neither conversion nor a baptismal certificate mattered since “Jew” was in the blood. The statute was drafted by Justice Minister Raphaël Alibert, and Pétain himself marked the text in his own hand and widened it, so the children and grandchildren of Jews could not slip out by a marriage or a generation.
Then the statute closed the doors to Jews: no public office, no officer’s commission, no teaching, no press, no radio, no cinema. A Jew who had been a principal on October 2 was out of the school on the day the law was applied. A Jew who edited a paper was out of the newsroom. A Jew in the officer corps was out of the army. The law made Jews a category for exclusion, and it made the category public.
Two weeks earlier, the German ordinance in the occupied zone had let prefects intern foreign Jews. Vichy did not wait to be asked for the rest. It defined the category itself and applied it south of the demarcation line, where there was no German governor.
Deportation from France to the death camps began.
On the anniversary of this infamy, France is being set on fire by rioting Islamists.
Marine Le Pen’s popularity keeps rising, and Macron and his government may soon collapse and go the way of the Vichy government.
Days before this anniversary, an Indian pilot and a handful of heroic Israelis, co-religionists of those the Vichy government tried to erase, performed a miracle in the skies that saved 182 people, a miracle that has made aviation history.
The story of the miracle is still unfolding, but details become clearer as investigations continue. The plane, a Boeing 737, was headed from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
An Omani co-pilot, Hamam al-Hamami, used an emergency axe to strike the Indian pilot, Smit Machchhar, on the head and hand. He cut off the plane’s engines, which sent the aircraft into a steep dive — thousands of feet a minute. Despite pain and profuse bleeding, the pilot managed to open the switch to the door, which unlocked the cockpit, and issued a mayday signal indicating he was in trouble:
“It just was a normal flight, and the co-pilot offered, I mean, he demand, not demanded, but he wanted to pray, which a lot of locals — they do pray, and which is not out of the ordinary. But while he was praying, out of respect, I was just looking at the front and not at the back. And suddenly, after I think I would say about four or five minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head.
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My first thought was that there was catastrophic damage to the aircraft, and something is not right. But then, after that, the blows kept coming, one after the other, and that’s when I realised that it’s not the aircraft; it’s the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.
I did try to stop him, but because of his initial blows, my vision was almost like nothing, and I was my I was completely blurred out, and at that point, the next thought I, the next feeling that I had was that the aircraft was sharply going down.
So my memory is still in bits and pieces right now, but this is what I remember out of that time, and I did try to, I did try and manage to open the door once, but I think he shut it back close. And at this point, I remember I was lying down on the cockpit floor, and I felt the aircraft and the whooshing sound and people screaming, and as I was telling the ambassador here that I had that one last fight left in me. That you know, call it personal or call it for people, but let’s say I did it. That if I don’t do it, I’m going to die.
And that’s when I pushed against everything. I gave everything that I had, and just went for the door and opened the door. And thankfully, people were waiting to pounce back, took over the control, and the rest is what you know.
The door from the inside has a a twist to open mechanism, and from the outside it can be only opened with a code. So my colleagues from outside were trying to put in the code, but the guy was not allowing to open the code, and the only way to open the door was to reach the knob, and like any other knob, just to twist it open, and it opens on its own. So there is no pin, but yes, the door. It was a short, quick twist, but the the point was to reach to that point, to reach to that place, and once I had my hand on the knob, I, I, I guess I, I, I twisted it and I opened it.”
A child, Nina Manes, standing outside a bathroom near the cockpit, heard sounds of a
A commercial pilot describes in great detail how miraculous was the ending:
This will go down in history as one of the best examples of aviation bravery. For this story to have the happy ending that it did, 3 things had to happen perfectly: First, Cpt. Smit, who, while on the floor (being attacked with an axe!!!), thought, “These are my last moments, but I can’t let these people die,” and somehow opened the cockpit door. Without his bravery and determination, Everybody dies no question. Second the passengers Yaniv and Yitzhack rushed the cockpit the minute they heard screams. Dont minimize this. Most people in a situation like this would freeze in their seats. Not to mention getting to the front of the plane in a zero G nose over. I’m assuming IDF training (mandatory for all Israelis) but even then excellent reactions under pressure. By rushing to the front immediately, they were on the other side of the door the second that Cpt Smit opened it. The IDF training also probably had a hand in their ability to rapidly neutralize the co-pilot. Yaniv taking the stick and pulling out of the dive is critical simply because there was no time otherwise. At the rate of descent by that point there is maybe 30s to impact if they keep diving (and they were already past Vne). [Vne is the highest speed an aircraft can sustain without exceeding its structural limitations.] However, contrary to popular male ego, a non pilot successfully recovering the plane has odds near zero. Commercial aircraft are huge and have massive momentum. Even in a small plane, if you are too heavy on the controls nothing happens for ten seconds, then next thing you know you are upside down. The most likely outcome after a non-pilot pulling out of a dive would be overcontrolling and triggering a stall. Fortunately (according to Yaniv’s interview) the relief pilot took over just as he leveled the plane. The relief pilots being on board was fortunate, the relief pilot managing to take over the controls before Yaniv could trigger a stall was perfect timing. The pilots were not just random pilots or random airline pilots, they were the relief crew which meant they had hundreds if not thousands of hours in that exact model. Why is this important? Because the co-pilot had smashed the instruments (once again from Yaniv’s interview) and the rudder was damaged from exceeding Vne. The relief pilots could handle this as a routine emergency, for a pilot unfamiliar with that airplane and instruments smashed it would be a insurmountable challenge. Finally the Pilot who thought he was going to die was in luck because on board was a dentist. A dental surgeon no less. Not quite the same as an ER doc, but enough to stop major arterial bleeding from multiple wounds. If somebody doesnt make a great movie out of this it would be a crime. This is aviation history being made.
Interviews of the co-pilot by UAE, Saudi, and Israeli investigators have begun. The general prosecutor of the UAE officially confirms that “terrorism” is the motive behind Flydubai flight FZ1073. Hamam intended to recreate a 9/11 type disaster by crashing the plane into some building in Tel Aviv.
Conspiracy theories flew and were rapidly debunked. Finger-pointing is now underway. But don’t lose track in all this chaff of what is significant; we just saw a miracle.