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« Won't you be my neighbor? | Main | Obligatory Gaza »

January 3, 2009

Being Reasonable--reaction from the Muslim family recently thrown off a flight by AirTrain

An interesting interview on NPR:

A Muslim-American passenger, one of nine members of a family detained and questioned at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after fellow passengers on their AirTran flight reported hearing a suspicious conversation, says the family is trying not to be angry at what happened.

(interview is audio, 5:13 in duration)

After listening to this interview, I have to say that Atif Irfan sounds like he is much less frustrated and angry about this whole situation than I am. In fact, he sounds really, really understanding and reasonable about the whole thing, especially for a man who was born and raised in the United States to have been treated this way.

But me? I'm pretty angry about it.

I am ashamed of and angry with Mr. Irfan's fellow passengers, who are clearly morons.
I mean first rate xenophobic morons--the type who make all Americans look stupid, and probably still don't understand that they were wrong. As noted yesterday at PoliBlog,

[W]hy in the world would a set of terrorists come onto the plane and call attention to themselves by talking about the safest place to sit on the plane? Beyond that, did the passengers, AirTran officials and the air marshals actually think that these people planned to blow up the plane and ride the wreckage to the ground? Last time I checked, radical jihadists weren’t too concerned about surviving their attacks.

But oh, you know... better safe than sorry! The guy looks like what I think a terrorist probably looks like!

Morons.

Also, Airtrain's initial response to this situation was terrible. As I told my wife last night, if I had been forced to get off the plane and go through the TSA's asinine screening process a second time just because a Muslim family was discussing flight safety, I would refuse to ever do business with that airline again. In fact, I might have refused to get back on the plane. They need to play catchup on public relations, beyond the apology they have offered to Mr. Irfan.

Wulf Posted by Wulf on January 3, 2009 at 11:06 AM

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