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Snakes on a plane
By Audrey Hudson THE WASHINGTON TIMES Published November 28, 2006
Muslim religious leaders removed from a Minneapolis flight last week exhibited behavior associated with a security probe by terrorists and were not merely engaged in prayers, according to witnesses, police reports and aviation security officials. Witnesses said three of the imams were praying loudly in the concourse and repeatedly shouted "Allah" when passengers were called for boarding US Airways Flight 300 to Phoenix. "I was suspicious by the way they were praying very loud," the gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department. Passengers and flight attendants told law-enforcement officials the imams switched from their assigned seats to a pattern associated with the September 11 terrorist attacks and also found in probes of U.S. security since the attacks -- two in the front row first-class, two in the middle of the plane on the exit aisle and two in the rear of the cabin. "That would alarm me," said a federal air marshal who asked to remain anonymous. "They now control all of the entry and exit routes to the plane." A pilot from another airline said: "That behavior has been identified as a terrorist probe in the airline industry."
But the imams who were escorted off the flight in handcuffs say they were merely praying before the 6:30 p.m. flight on Nov. 20, and yesterday led a protest by prayer with other religious leaders at the airline's ticket counter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, called removing the imams an act of Islamophobia and compared it to racism against blacks. "It's a shame that as an African-American and a Muslim I have the double whammy of having to worry about driving while black and flying while Muslim," Mr. Bray said. The protesters also called on Congress to pass legislation to outlaw passenger profiling.
This is all the more reason to "profile" passengers, and Muslims in general. The daily prayer ritual is one thing; conducting it in such a flagrant way seems inconsistent with what so-called mainstream Muslims say about themselves and their faith.
Certainly, this bunch has a lot to answer for, what with the seat-switching behavior.
I think what we've just experienced is a slightly different flavor of terrorism, but terrorism nevertheless. These guys, apparently with no weapons whatsoever, managed to disrupt quite a number of innocent Americans' travel plans and create justifiable fear.
This sort of behavior constitutes harrassment of the other passengers, at the very least. It is the same sort of thing that urban dwellers experience when a flock of thugs loiter outside someone's house, cursing and making noise at all hours of the day. They are technically doing very little that's actionable, but managing to spread quite a bit of fear and misery in the process.
Mr. Bray should realize that the same kind of actions would have resulted in trouble if they'd been undertaken by any other group of people easily identifiable as "brothers" by their dress: homies in baggy shorts, tattooed bikers, Hassidic Jews, or fat white guys dressed to attend a football game.
I would not call it "profiling" to stop a bunch of people from scaring the shit out of a bunch of other people.
musicnotes
When infants and elderly white women start enlisting as suicide bombers, it
will make sense to search them at airports. Until that unlikely development
takes place, though, it is Middle Eastern Muslim men who are the problem.
Anyone who reads a newspaper or watches television knows this to be true,
yet we resist profiling as if it were an outrage against human decency. At
some point we are going to have to come to grips with the fact that we are
at war to the death with these people and the side that ties itself in
knots worrying about political correctness is the side that's going to
lose.