Richard Reid

When the shoe bomber Richard Reid was captured in 2001 before he could blow up an American Airlines plane enroute from Paris to Miami by igniting his shoe, Al Qaeda became concerned.

“He never should have been detected,” said an anonymous al-Qaeda cell leader. “Our line of explosive haberdashery items could benefit from some intense R & D,” he added, and revealed that money has been allocated to design and build a better shoe bomb.

Reid’s faulty shoes

We have learned that this task has fallen to Mohammed al Florsheim, a prominent Saudi footwear engineer. “The best design should incorporate the shoelace as the fuse,” he said. However, many young terrorists today do not like that style of shoe, notwithstanding that they have no clue on how to tie the lace. “It’s a skill that evil, decadent, Western children learn early in life,” he said, “but many of our martyr/terrorists grew up wearing sandals and the mysteries of shoelace tying are beyond their reach.”

Soon after Reid’s capture, Al Florsheim suggested a loafer design that cleverly contained the fuse in its tassels, but many Muslim men feel that tassels are feminine. “The tassels jiggle like a woman’s buttcheeks,” said a terrorist student, who was nursing the loss of several fingers while assembling a timing device. “The tassel is a symbol of Western decadence and decay,” he added, “and does not belong on my feet, only on the nipples of those disgusting lap dancers I will visit in America the night before I fly my plane into my target.”

Modern sneaker bomb

“The most common shoe is the sneaker, of course,” continued al Florsheim, “and we are lucky to have access to the same sweatshops used by Michael Jordan and Kathy Lee Gifford.” Al Florsheim, who swears that he is not even remotely Jewish despite his name, showed us a number of designs incorporating the fuse in the sneaker’s tongue. “Very natural to adjust the tongue for comfort,” said al Florsheim. “Nothing suspicious at all. But pull the tongue and boom, another martyr flies to the bosom of Allah, where he will be reassembled.” Middle Eastern men wearing sneakers, however, would be suspicious to security personnel. “It’s blatant shoe profiling,” said Al Florsheim, “and shouldn’t be allowed, but those rotten, Caucasian pig Americans have no respect for us or our ethnicity.

Al Florsheim claims to have made a breakthrough in shoe bombs, a secret he obviously will not share with us. Insiders tell us, however, that the shoe ploy is fake and that al Florsheim has developed a foot bomb. The explosives are embedded in the terrorist’s ankle and the detonator is a fake big toe, which replaces the one amputated when the explosives are inserted into the foot. Disgruntled Al Quada members at first objected to the loss of the toe until it was pointed out that their entire body was going to be amputated anyway for the glory of Allah.

Al Florsheim represents a generation of terrorists who are brutal, determined and fashion conscious. Their handiwork will present new and intriguing challenges in America’s war on terrorism and footwear and it behooves us all to keep our heads down and report suspicious feet to the local authorities.