'Terror victim' Dawkins wails at honey loss: Atheist professor mocked on internet after complaining that airport security took his jar

Mocked: Professor Richard Dawkins was mercilessly mocked on the internet after he complained that 'Bin laden has won' because airport staff confiscated his jar of honey

Atheist Professor Richard Dawkins was mercilessly mocked on the internet yesterday after he complained that Bin laden has won... because airport staff confiscated his jar of honey.
The respected evolutionary biologist took to Twitter to declare: ‘Bin Laden has won, in airports of the world every day.’
He added: ‘I had a little jar of honey, now thrown away by rule-bound dundridges. STUPID waste.’
The outspoken atheist, who came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, uses his self-coined word ‘dundridges’ to describe petty jobsworths.
The term, which Mr Dawkins has used in his writings, was inspired by the character J. Dundridge in the 1975 novel, Blott on the Landscape.
The Oxford University academic was treated to a flood of sarcastic replies to his Twitter posting.
One Twitter user wrote: ‘I’m not sure that Bin Laden’s number one target was your honey jar, but yeah, he kinda won.’
Another added: ‘You truly are the real victim of terrorism.’
And one advised: ‘You could have just read the rules properly and not kept it in your hand luggage...’
Mr Dawkins hit back: ‘Of course I know the airport security rules. My point is those rules are stupid advertising displays of dundridge zeal. Bin Laden has won.’
He added: ‘Are you carpers really too thick to see the difference between a matter of general principle and a petty concern with a single jar of honey?’
Some of Mr Dawkin’s 844,000 followers had more sympathy.

 

One wrote: ‘You are quite right. After the awful violence & bloodshed, the winning tactic of the terrorist is to instil lasting fear.’
International airports around the world stop passengers taking containers containing more than 100ml of liquid in their hand baggage.

Rules: International airports around the world stop passengers taking containers containing more than 100ml of liquid in their hand baggage

The rules frequently catch out passengers carrying semi-solid foods such as pate, foie gras or honey, which are often bought by tourists as gifts.
The security measures were imposed in 2006 after British police said they had foiled a plot to bring down as many as 10 planes with explosive liquids.
Mr Dawkins’ outburst comes after he sparked anger in August with a tweet which critics claimed was ‘anti-Muslim’.
On that occasion he posted: ‘All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.’
And last month he found himself at the centre of a row over an interview he gave to the Times Magazine in which he appeared to suggest he was the victim of ‘mild paedophilia’ at school and that current cases of historical child sex abuse had been overblown.
‘I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours’, he said.