In Case You Thought The Paranoia Was Gone
9 Muslims Are Pulled From Plane and Denied Re-entry; Airline Apologizes Next Day
AirTran Airways apologized Friday for an incident on New Year’s Day in which airline officials pulled nine Muslim passengers off a domestic flight and refused to rebook them, even though F.B.I. agents said they had done nothing wrong.
The incident occurred Thursday at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after members of a Muslim family boarding a flight to Orlando, Fla., had a conversation about the safest place to sit in the event of an accident. Other passengers reported the remarks as suspicious to a flight attendant.
( source )
Lets hope I’m never on a plane with such a paranoid bunch of idiots fellow travelers – I absolutely hate flying and have often discussed the safest place to sit on a plane in the event of an accident with people I’m with….. never once thinking that it was a discussion that could get me yanked from the plane and questioned by the authorities.
(The answer, if your interested, is at the back of the plane and as far away from a window as possible, everyone in front of me is simple padding.)
Yes I’m sure if a plane goes down from a few thousand feet up, those in the back will be just fine
But on a serious note, I wonder what those two passengers were thinking. They became suspicious after overhearing a conversation about which section of the plane would be safer. Did they think these Mooslims were on board just to make sure the plane went down, and they would hang out in the “safe section” ?
Pretty ridiculous.
I wonder if this will morph into another instance of HAJ (that’s Hysterical Airline Jihad, patent pending)?
Remember the Syrian musicians travelling to a wedding shortly after 9/11? Or the “Flying Imams”? Incidents in which Arab or Muslim-looking folks have the temerity to do things like, well, pray, and a group of paranoids decide they’re “scowling” and “acting suspicious” and “looking nervous”. Incidents like that tend to enter the URQ mythology as authentic cases of thwarted terror, long after they’ve been debunked. My favourites were the URQ bloggers who opined that the Flying Imams were all secret provocateurs, a pretty inventive way of acknowledging that they didn’t actually do anything wrong.