Flying While Muslim
I am under no illusions that a blog like this can affect public mood, but in the least, what it can do is attest to the social awakening of at least one more member of the silent Muslim majority. It is troubling that average Muslims are adversely affected by the increasingly negative portrayal of them on basis of the actions of a few. Each report of alleged terrorist plots by a handful of Muslims is inevitably followed by the blanket treatment of increased scrutiny and hostility to all Muslims. Today, this is apparent in the way Muslims are treated at airports when they want to travel. Muslims boarding a plane are viewed with suspicion. There has been an increase in the number of Muslims being racially profiled and unjustifiably detained by airport and airlines authorities. Two recent examples, which are summarized later in this blog, illustrate this problem.
Muslims, have for the most part, accepted these unjust acts because they choose to understand that people are acting out of fear. They understand that people are afraid of being blown apart in mid-air while on a plane. The majority of Muslims react to news like the recent United Kingdom foiled terror plots in much the same way as a non-Muslim would – apprehension, shock, fear, and outrage. There is a legitimate fear, one that is shared across the board by all, including Muslims. However, it is also clear that the silent acceptance of unjust racial profiling policies has not abated the intense scrutiny and hostility towards Muslims. If anything, it has exacerbated the problem. Since September 11, racial profiling, unjust harassment and detainment by airport officials towards traveling Muslims has become commonplace.
This fact is not acknowledged by the mainstream world media. The notion that everyone undergoes intensive checks is widespread. And that may be true in so far as people going through the security checks through airport checkpoints. However, the mainstream media ignores racial profiling that lead to Muslim being interrogated, harassed and detained at airports. Not everyone is singled out. There are far more incidents at airports involving Muslim people than not. Common Muslim names and the ordering of Muslim special meals on airlines, the final destination of the trip, and where you have flown in from are just some of the markers that are used by airport and airline officials to single out Muslims for special treatment.
By accepting racial profiling, Muslims are unknowingly acknowledging that they have something to be ashamed of. By accepting unjustifiable racial profiling policies, they are also reinforcing in the minds of the others that they should be discriminated against because they are indeed capable of being a potential terrorist. This is too dangerous a perception to stay silent about.
Today, it is racial profiling of Muslims at airports. What will it be tomorrow?
In these times more than in any other time, it is unacceptable to quietly accept the racial profiling others impose on Muslims. It is not enough to live your life in hopes that others will see you as the rule and not the exception. If this sort of thinking is allowed to perpetuate, it can only lead to further damage to our lives as we know it.
Consequences of Racial Profiling
Firstly, when airport and airline officials single out a Muslim under racial profiling, they send out a signal to the Muslim and to all the onlookers that the individual is a potential terrorist. It is no surprise then when people baselessly accuse those of “typically Muslim appearance” of being potential terrorists. It is no surprise then when people have a sick fearful feeling when they see a typically Muslim person sit next to them in an airplane. This is a harmful signal that propagates like a viral infection until all of society is infected. Further, there are 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. In the Western world, there are 6 million in the United States and almost 22 million Muslims in Europe. That is a whole lot of people in society to alienate and disaffect through racial profiling.
Secondly, the Muslim majority must be vocal about what we are and what we are not because if we are not, then we will lose out in this war of ideas. When we have others speak on behalf of us, we lose out because others will not always have our interests at heart. The antagonistic term “Islamic-fascists” uttered recently by President George Bush is an example of this. Never mind that President Bush got his advice and encouragement from Muslim-haters disguised as political analysts, such as Lebanese-Christian Fouad Ajami. Never mind that the term itself is factually incorrect – fascism denotes a state marked by the centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship. Fascism implies that there is a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. However, there is no centralized authority in Islam. Muslims do not have a Pope to follow as the Catholics do. This is just one more example of mass misinformation regarding Islam and Muslims.
Summary of Two Recent News Events that Illustrate Racial Profiling
Incident 1:
On August 23, 2006, a plane bound for India returned to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after “after several passengers displayed behavior of concern," Northwest Airlines said in a written statement. Passengers on the plane said air marshals intervened after several men began fidgeting with mobile phones and plastic bags. Two Dutch F-16 jets accompanied the 273-seat DC10-30 plane on its return to Amsterdam. When the plane landed, police arrested 12 of the 149 passengers on the Northwest Airlines flight 42 to Mumbai on Wednesday. On August 24, 2006, it was revealed that all 12 arrested were males born in Mumbai, according to the Indian junior foreign minister Anand Sharma. But some apparently held other passports, an Indian Foreign Ministry official added. On the same day, Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner told journalists in The Hague that the incident did “not appear to be terror related.” And according to CNN, a spokeswoman for the Dutch counter-terrorism office added: "There is no indication of a terrorist threat on the plane that returned to Schiphol."
Indications that racial profiling was a key in this incident include several statements from some of the passengers on the airplane: Sarat Menon, a Dutch-speaking Indian who works in Brussels, said he had chatted to the group, all men, in an airport coffee bar before take-off. They told him they had been on holiday in Tobago. 'Four of them had long beards. They spoke Urdu. They were certainly not highly educated people,' he told the daily Telegraaf. Nitin Patel, an Indian who lives in Boston, told the AD newspaper he had the feeling 'that these men wanted to hijack the aircraft.' They were also described as of 'typically Muslim appearance.' According to passengers, a mobile phone rang and the group cheered, prompting an anxious response among cabin crew. One of them had a guitar case with him. The men were reported to have been sending text messages, passing their mobile phones among each other and walking down the aisles before the seat belt light was turned off.
We know from reports that some of the men had beards, and so were of “typically Muslim appearance”. Apparently, that was enough to invite scrutiny. When they did what travelers would normally do when traveling in a large group – i.e., passing things around between themselves and searching for things in the hand luggage – something I know I myself do when I travel alone, it became a magnified security problem.
And it was also reported in the same CNN article on August 24, 2006 that the men had not been formally charged. But an airport policeman said authorities had enough information to hold the 12 for at least three days. However, the truth emerged a few days later when all 12 men were released and flew back home to India where they told their stories.
The mainstream Western media were eerily silent on the follow-up to this story. Given the explosive coverage given to the arrests of the 12, the average person would think that another (yet again) terror plot involving Muslims was foiled.
What is saddening was a remark from one of 12 men: “It is sad that we were taken for terrorists - despicable people - but it is just fate,".
Incident 2:
On August 16, two Brits of South-Asian origin was forced to leave a plane bound to Manchester from Malaga, Spain, after passengers “became suspicious of their behaviour”, which reportedly amounted to “speaking Arabic” and being “seen repeatedly checking their watches”. The men, 22 year-old students, had gone through the extensive security checks before boarding the plane. Yet, Monarch Airlines pilot insisted that the men be removed for “security reasons” stemming from the Spanish authorities, which was later determined to be untrue. This incident is even more worrying – passengers actually dictated to the airlines that the two students be removed because they were “uncomfortable”. The fact that these two students had undergone and cleared the extensive security checks was lost upon these passengers. It is shocking that the airlines abided the requests of these passengers. If there was anyone that should have been forced to leave the airplane, it should have been those passengers who had raised a ruckus in the first place. If they were uncomfortable, then they should have not boarded the airplane. Instead, they caused the needless delay of the flight and the detainment of two innocent passengers because of racial discrimination.
What do the two examples show? It tells of the growing racial profiling of Muslims. And one can be sure that there are numerous unreported examples of discriminatory incidents occurring in airports around the world today. This is a worrying trend.
Statistics
Let’s look at this from a statistical perspective to illustrate just how irrational people have gotten. There are 1.6 million Muslims in the UK. 24 Muslims in UK were allegedly plotting terrorism. That is 0.0015% of the UK Muslim population! Now let us even say that there are 1000 more of fellow plotters out there in the UK – that’s still only 0.067% of the Muslim population. Where does that leave the rest of the Muslim population in UK? When does is become acceptable to affect 99.93% of the Muslim population for the alleged crimes of 0.067%?
There are about 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. I am not even going to bother to show the numbers involving say even 200K of potential Muslim terrorists worldwide. But one gets the idea. Apologists for racial profiling say that these mad people are acting out of fear. How can alienating 99.9% of Muslims with racist policies make good tactical sense?
Finally, probability theory says that the chances of something happening the next time are not necessarily related to what has already happened. Data shows that one’s chances of being killed in an aircraft are about 1 in 11 million. On the other hand, the chances of being killed in an automobile accident are 1 in 5000. Statistically, one is at far greater risk driving to the airport than getting on an airplane. However, the perception (called the gambler’s fallacy) is that you have more control over your fate when you are in your car than as a passenger. Data shows otherwise considering that over 50,000 people are killed on the highways every year.
A joke told among mathematicians demonstrates the nature of the fallacy. When flying on an airplane, a man decides to always bring a bomb with him. "The chances of an airplane having a bomb on it are very small," he reasons, "and certainly the chances of having two are almost none!"
Muslims, have for the most part, accepted these unjust acts because they choose to understand that people are acting out of fear. They understand that people are afraid of being blown apart in mid-air while on a plane. The majority of Muslims react to news like the recent United Kingdom foiled terror plots in much the same way as a non-Muslim would – apprehension, shock, fear, and outrage. There is a legitimate fear, one that is shared across the board by all, including Muslims. However, it is also clear that the silent acceptance of unjust racial profiling policies has not abated the intense scrutiny and hostility towards Muslims. If anything, it has exacerbated the problem. Since September 11, racial profiling, unjust harassment and detainment by airport officials towards traveling Muslims has become commonplace.
This fact is not acknowledged by the mainstream world media. The notion that everyone undergoes intensive checks is widespread. And that may be true in so far as people going through the security checks through airport checkpoints. However, the mainstream media ignores racial profiling that lead to Muslim being interrogated, harassed and detained at airports. Not everyone is singled out. There are far more incidents at airports involving Muslim people than not. Common Muslim names and the ordering of Muslim special meals on airlines, the final destination of the trip, and where you have flown in from are just some of the markers that are used by airport and airline officials to single out Muslims for special treatment.
By accepting racial profiling, Muslims are unknowingly acknowledging that they have something to be ashamed of. By accepting unjustifiable racial profiling policies, they are also reinforcing in the minds of the others that they should be discriminated against because they are indeed capable of being a potential terrorist. This is too dangerous a perception to stay silent about.
Today, it is racial profiling of Muslims at airports. What will it be tomorrow?
In these times more than in any other time, it is unacceptable to quietly accept the racial profiling others impose on Muslims. It is not enough to live your life in hopes that others will see you as the rule and not the exception. If this sort of thinking is allowed to perpetuate, it can only lead to further damage to our lives as we know it.
Consequences of Racial Profiling
Firstly, when airport and airline officials single out a Muslim under racial profiling, they send out a signal to the Muslim and to all the onlookers that the individual is a potential terrorist. It is no surprise then when people baselessly accuse those of “typically Muslim appearance” of being potential terrorists. It is no surprise then when people have a sick fearful feeling when they see a typically Muslim person sit next to them in an airplane. This is a harmful signal that propagates like a viral infection until all of society is infected. Further, there are 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. In the Western world, there are 6 million in the United States and almost 22 million Muslims in Europe. That is a whole lot of people in society to alienate and disaffect through racial profiling.
Secondly, the Muslim majority must be vocal about what we are and what we are not because if we are not, then we will lose out in this war of ideas. When we have others speak on behalf of us, we lose out because others will not always have our interests at heart. The antagonistic term “Islamic-fascists” uttered recently by President George Bush is an example of this. Never mind that President Bush got his advice and encouragement from Muslim-haters disguised as political analysts, such as Lebanese-Christian Fouad Ajami. Never mind that the term itself is factually incorrect – fascism denotes a state marked by the centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship. Fascism implies that there is a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism. However, there is no centralized authority in Islam. Muslims do not have a Pope to follow as the Catholics do. This is just one more example of mass misinformation regarding Islam and Muslims.
Summary of Two Recent News Events that Illustrate Racial Profiling
Incident 1:
On August 23, 2006, a plane bound for India returned to Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport after “after several passengers displayed behavior of concern," Northwest Airlines said in a written statement. Passengers on the plane said air marshals intervened after several men began fidgeting with mobile phones and plastic bags. Two Dutch F-16 jets accompanied the 273-seat DC10-30 plane on its return to Amsterdam. When the plane landed, police arrested 12 of the 149 passengers on the Northwest Airlines flight 42 to Mumbai on Wednesday. On August 24, 2006, it was revealed that all 12 arrested were males born in Mumbai, according to the Indian junior foreign minister Anand Sharma. But some apparently held other passports, an Indian Foreign Ministry official added. On the same day, Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner told journalists in The Hague that the incident did “not appear to be terror related.” And according to CNN, a spokeswoman for the Dutch counter-terrorism office added: "There is no indication of a terrorist threat on the plane that returned to Schiphol."
Indications that racial profiling was a key in this incident include several statements from some of the passengers on the airplane: Sarat Menon, a Dutch-speaking Indian who works in Brussels, said he had chatted to the group, all men, in an airport coffee bar before take-off. They told him they had been on holiday in Tobago. 'Four of them had long beards. They spoke Urdu. They were certainly not highly educated people,' he told the daily Telegraaf. Nitin Patel, an Indian who lives in Boston, told the AD newspaper he had the feeling 'that these men wanted to hijack the aircraft.' They were also described as of 'typically Muslim appearance.' According to passengers, a mobile phone rang and the group cheered, prompting an anxious response among cabin crew. One of them had a guitar case with him. The men were reported to have been sending text messages, passing their mobile phones among each other and walking down the aisles before the seat belt light was turned off.
We know from reports that some of the men had beards, and so were of “typically Muslim appearance”. Apparently, that was enough to invite scrutiny. When they did what travelers would normally do when traveling in a large group – i.e., passing things around between themselves and searching for things in the hand luggage – something I know I myself do when I travel alone, it became a magnified security problem.
And it was also reported in the same CNN article on August 24, 2006 that the men had not been formally charged. But an airport policeman said authorities had enough information to hold the 12 for at least three days. However, the truth emerged a few days later when all 12 men were released and flew back home to India where they told their stories.
The mainstream Western media were eerily silent on the follow-up to this story. Given the explosive coverage given to the arrests of the 12, the average person would think that another (yet again) terror plot involving Muslims was foiled.
What is saddening was a remark from one of 12 men: “It is sad that we were taken for terrorists - despicable people - but it is just fate,".
Incident 2:
On August 16, two Brits of South-Asian origin was forced to leave a plane bound to Manchester from Malaga, Spain, after passengers “became suspicious of their behaviour”, which reportedly amounted to “speaking Arabic” and being “seen repeatedly checking their watches”. The men, 22 year-old students, had gone through the extensive security checks before boarding the plane. Yet, Monarch Airlines pilot insisted that the men be removed for “security reasons” stemming from the Spanish authorities, which was later determined to be untrue. This incident is even more worrying – passengers actually dictated to the airlines that the two students be removed because they were “uncomfortable”. The fact that these two students had undergone and cleared the extensive security checks was lost upon these passengers. It is shocking that the airlines abided the requests of these passengers. If there was anyone that should have been forced to leave the airplane, it should have been those passengers who had raised a ruckus in the first place. If they were uncomfortable, then they should have not boarded the airplane. Instead, they caused the needless delay of the flight and the detainment of two innocent passengers because of racial discrimination.
What do the two examples show? It tells of the growing racial profiling of Muslims. And one can be sure that there are numerous unreported examples of discriminatory incidents occurring in airports around the world today. This is a worrying trend.
Statistics
Let’s look at this from a statistical perspective to illustrate just how irrational people have gotten. There are 1.6 million Muslims in the UK. 24 Muslims in UK were allegedly plotting terrorism. That is 0.0015% of the UK Muslim population! Now let us even say that there are 1000 more of fellow plotters out there in the UK – that’s still only 0.067% of the Muslim population. Where does that leave the rest of the Muslim population in UK? When does is become acceptable to affect 99.93% of the Muslim population for the alleged crimes of 0.067%?
There are about 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. I am not even going to bother to show the numbers involving say even 200K of potential Muslim terrorists worldwide. But one gets the idea. Apologists for racial profiling say that these mad people are acting out of fear. How can alienating 99.9% of Muslims with racist policies make good tactical sense?
Finally, probability theory says that the chances of something happening the next time are not necessarily related to what has already happened. Data shows that one’s chances of being killed in an aircraft are about 1 in 11 million. On the other hand, the chances of being killed in an automobile accident are 1 in 5000. Statistically, one is at far greater risk driving to the airport than getting on an airplane. However, the perception (called the gambler’s fallacy) is that you have more control over your fate when you are in your car than as a passenger. Data shows otherwise considering that over 50,000 people are killed on the highways every year.
A joke told among mathematicians demonstrates the nature of the fallacy. When flying on an airplane, a man decides to always bring a bomb with him. "The chances of an airplane having a bomb on it are very small," he reasons, "and certainly the chances of having two are almost none!"
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler's_fallacy
When taken from a statistical perspective, it is starkly clear how absurd people have gotten.
It is unacceptable to racially profile people. And it is about time Muslims took a stand on this madness before it escalates into things previously unimaginable. I am not convinced that this is as far-fetched as it appears to be given the growing acceptance of racial profiling and discrimination based on irrational fears.
When taken from a statistical perspective, it is starkly clear how absurd people have gotten.
It is unacceptable to racially profile people. And it is about time Muslims took a stand on this madness before it escalates into things previously unimaginable. I am not convinced that this is as far-fetched as it appears to be given the growing acceptance of racial profiling and discrimination based on irrational fears.
posted by Sabrina at
4:44 PM
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