There are moments when the most important question is not what happened but how quickly everyone decided what happened. The Flydubai FZ 1073 incident is one such moment. On September 30, a Flydubai flight travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv experienced a terrifying incident. The Co-Pilot allegedly attacked the captain, the aircraft lost altitude dramatically, and passengers and crew intervened before the aircraft was diverted to Saudi Arabia. The basic facts are horrifying enough, but the circumstances surrounding the Incident raise questions that deserve answers before conclusions are turned into headlines. Within hours, the language surrounding the incident became remarkably definitive. Israel’s Defence Minister described it as an attempted “Jihadist terror attack”, yet at the same time the precise motive was still under investigation. Even Benjamin Netanyahu initially acknowledged that it was too early to determine the motive, while later saying Israeli authorities had information suggesting Islamist radicalisation. And this is where my question is. How quickly does an alleged attack become an ideological verdict? The moment the alleged perpetrator’s identity becomes associated with Islam, does the........

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