You know, I have no real objections to shielding airlines from liability for terrorist actions. That makes a certain sense. For this, however, I hope Northwest gets sued out of business. They should never have acceeded to this, even if the other passengers all left the plane.
You wonder what these passengers, the ones who wanted the Arab-Americans thrown off the plane, are going to do with the rest of their lives. Avoid all dark skinned peoples, on the possibility that they might be terrorists? (I suppose in Utah and to some extent in Minnesota, avoiding dark skinned peoples isn't actually all that difficult.) Maybe they'll just avoid the ones with turbans. Or maybe just on planes, trains, and automobiles.
Pat Hogan, public-affairs officer for the Metropolitan Airports Commission Police Department, said officers from his agency were called to assist in removing the men, as they are any time passengers are removed from a flight. Hogan, however, also stressed the decision to remove the men "certainly wasn't ours."
Yeah? So what? I hope you get sued, too, and lose big time. The passengers weren't disruptive, they weren't doing anything wrong, and the request from the pilot and crew was something that should never have been made. And then you questioned them, as if they had done something wrong, instead of being the people who were wronged.
Despite the official posture, it's clear that in terminals and aircraft cabins, certain passengers are being looked over with sharper eyes. At Los Angeles International Airport, a federal official who asked not to be identified said there have been instances in which people of Middle Eastern origin have been bumped from several flights in a row. Some, he said, were permitted to check their bags--thus allowing the luggage to be searched--and reach the entry to the jet way before they were stopped for questioning. "It's pure racial profiling," the official said.
It's also wrong, and, at the moment, quite illegal.
At the moment.
Give Bush his due; he has said, again and again since that day, that we should not turn on Muslims and Arabs in this country. He's gone to mosques, he's had Muslim clerics at the national ceremony of mourning. I don't actually know what else he could do to lead in this matter, how much more clear that part of his message could be.
And nobody is listening to him. Nobody wants to listen to him on this. It's much easier to go along our bigoted way.
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!