In the aftermath of the explosion in Boston, Muslims again appear the target of arbitrary suspicion and detention. On a flight from Boston to Chicago, passengers became alarmed when two different passengers were heard speaking in Arabic. The two passengers were not traveling or seated together but the flight crew returned to the gate to have the two passengers detained.
Several passengers were marathoners. The two men were removed from the plane and detained . . . for speaking one of the most common languages on Earth.
Putting aside the prejudice in the treatment of Arabic speakers, it is illogical to think that terrorists would speak in Arabic if they were truly going to harm passengers. True terrorists try to blend in with population.
The airline bears responsibility for this conduct. There should be more than simply speaking Arabic to have a plane returned to the gate and passengers detained.
Just for the record, estimates indicate that there are 422 million Arabic speakers in this world. I am not sure what is required from Arabic speaking people? Should they simply not speak in public while traveling in the United States to avoid security alerts and detention?
SOURCE: KRMG
Mike A:
Put yourself and on that plane and tell me how you’d vote.
The captain had to make a security decision based the best information he had available. I would not fault his reliance on anecdotal evidence in the context of an immediate bombing scenario, an ongoing search for the killers, complaints from passengers, and the knowledge we all have about the origin of many hijacking threats. We can certainly compensate our Arabic speaking friends for their trouble and inconvenience. That would be a pittance compared to the costs if the passengers had been right, the pilot had succumbed to political correctness, and tragedy struck.
Leejcaroll,
Mespo:
This incident was either
1) Sound security practice, or
2) Hysterical racist stereotyping
I’m with (2)
If it was (1) …..
Is it your argument that people speaking Arabic on a flight should cause that flight to land at the nearest airport – with an escort of F15’s to shoot it down if it deviates from the flight path?
Should passengers be instructed not to speak Arabic (or indeed any language that sounds funny)?
Does this apply only if they look brown?
Should brown people be advised to use use skin-lightening creams before boarding a flight?
Oh! Here’s an idea…
Should terrorists on a plane avoid talking in Arabic about the hijacking that they are about to pull off?
What if someone not in their group understands Arabic?
Would not the use of Arabic by Arabic-speaking people on a flight be an indication that they are not terrorists?
Brilliant!
Terrorists get on the flight. They got into the vountry in the first place. Then for an internal flight passed all the credential and physical scanning that the TSA bought and maintains at massive expense. Then they speak Arabic …and their cover is blown. Foiled! They just sit in their seats quietly while the aircraft returns to the gate and large gentlemen with guns take them off.
What you appear to be recommending is institutionalised stupidity.
.
Take this woman Shoshana Hebshi
http://tsanewsblog.com/8961/news/shoshana-hebshi-suing-the-tsa-and-frontier-airlines/
She happened to be of a brownish persuasion and had the misfortune to be on the same flight as two completely innocent brown men whose use of the bathroom caused someone to panic.
She had no connection worth them other than her brownish attributes. Hauled off in handcuffs, strip-searched, held for 4 hours.
I wish her great success in her lawsuit.
Maybe it will settle out of court.
A danger for her would be that a jury could be packed with moronic people who have been traumatised by the Department of Homeland Stupidity.
A captain of a ship, and more importantly a plane, has to have absolute discretion to throw off anyone he does not like the looks, sound, or smell of.
I’m with the Gyges/Mike A. camp with an extra “what Mike A. said” thrown in.
Even true anecdotes are based on a flawed sample space, mespo.
Mespo,
I speak of Jeffersons inagural speech
….
Mike, mespo, gyges and I are on the same basic page Mike. While I agree it was harsh… It’s was a safety exception in play long before Boston….
mespo:
The principal problem with anecdotal justification is that it is anecdotal. Anecdotes combined with fear is the classic recipe for lynch mobs. Indeed, we have fought two wars this past decade based largely on anecdotal evidence. But if that is the new standard, give me a few anecdotes and a couple of hours and I’ll cobble together a probable cause affidavit sufficient for a warrant to search whatever you like.
Fear distorts reason. Yesterday the right-wing media was almost frantically concocting new Muslim conspiracies to explain the Boston bombings.
I’m with Gyges on this one.
AY:
“We are bound, you, I, and every one to make common cause, even
with error itself, to maintain the common right of freedom of
conscience.” –Thomas Jefferson to Edward Dowse, 1803.
Darren Smith: “I wonder if my wife and I conversed in German we could get detained for being Nazis…?”
When I travel in non-English speaking countries, I use my half-baked French so the locals think, “he’s not an American.” I see it as a form of self-defence.
Mespo,
I think Jefferson stated something along those lines…. And I’m paraphrasing…. Though we all hold different beliefs… That’s what binds us together as a nation……. So long as we allow those who differ to hold those beliefs as they do…..(liberally paraphrased)
Gyres:
Reasonable people can differ.
Mespo,
I thought I answered your claim of no rational basis for the decision by pointing out that contextual, historical, anecdotal, and statistical reasons exist which support the decision. We may disagree with the decision but can we really question its rational basis without resort to emotional revulsion over the seeming unfairness of it?
I guess I shouldn’t say that there was no reason. Maybe no GOOD reason would be a better standard. Rational’s a funny word, I mean we can rationalize a wide variety of things, if we’re making bad assumptions or willing to ignore arguments and facts that don’t support or decision. So yes, I can absolutely question the quality of the rational basis without resorting to emotional revulsion (also, since when does what’s fair not have a place when discussion if a decision was justified or not?).
Let’s just look at the statistics you cited. What they say is that, if you pick a random terrorist attack last year, you’ve got a slightly better than half chance of picking one done by Sunni extremists. The thing is, we’re not talking about if a random terrorist attack was being done by Sunni extremists. We’re talking about the likelihood that a non-random attack would be done by somebody who spoke Arabic. There are parameters: on an airplane; leaving from Boston; and following immediately after another terrorist attack on U.S. soil (which increases the likelihood of a link between the two); in a different manner then the attack it follows. I’m guessing that if we look at the probability of most of those happening, we’d find that a)terrorist hijacking of planes are very rare when compared to total numbers of flights within the Continental US carrying at least two people who speak Arabic b)That number’s even lower when departing from Boston c)terrorist attacks immediately after another attack are rare in the U.S,. especially when the method is vastly different. I’d be willing to bet that when you factor in all those variables, there would be a higher chance of that one of the passengers had some sort of nasty and contagious illness than the two men were terrorists.
To draw an analogy, you could, looking at statistics for the entire world, say that the next person I’m going to meet is more likely to speak Mandarin than any other language. Or, looking at the statistics for Colorado, you could say that the next person I’m going to meet is MUCH more likely to speak English.
So what I’m saying is, while there may be a reason for that pilot to have be afraid of having Arabic speakers on a plane, it has more basis in the way our brains are wired, the way terrorism, Islam, and people who speak Arabic are portrayed in than with the actual chance that those two men had any ill intent.
lottakatz:
Of course McVeigh is the archetypal domestic terrorist, attacking the most archetypal target, a govt building housing several law enforcement agencies.
I didn’t say that domestic terrorists don’t kill people, what I said was their targets are usually govt or institutional, not random anybodies in the street.
That is why, without knowing any more, my first guess is that the Boston attack of non-american origin. It was a classic, attack as many unaffiliated people as indiscriminately possible, type attack, which has the hallmarks of a foreign, likely theologically based, motivation.
Of course I may well be proven wrong, but if it is a domestically based person or group, it would be an unusual targeting.
Well, I guess we have now educated terrorists not to speak Arabic on airplanes. Since, surely, Arabic speakers are incapable of learning any other language, and, surely, Arabic-speaking terrorists could not possibly do anything without talking about it in Arabic, problem solved. We are all safer now.
It would be better, though, to have TSA weed them out at the security line — just exclude all Arabic speakers and all persons who hold passports from Arabic-speaking countries — because Arabic-speakers are especially sneaky about getting stuff through airport security (and then talking about it in Arabic on the plane).
Gyges:
“The numbers from the report you cited were for attacks worldwide, against any target. A closer look limiting ourselves to attacks on US soil shows a different picture.”
**********************
I’m certain we could limit the data in such a way that only hicks from Mississippi (like our apparent Ricin mailer) were the most likely culprits but that would prove very little about the reasonableness of the belief by that pilot. You are simply asking too much for people to ignore the very real fact that some significant segment of the Sunnis want us all very much dead. There’s too much history, too much video footage of the terrorists threatening us, and too many instances of horrific attacks around the globe for us to don the blinders you suggest.
Mespo,
Also, just for fun:Wikipedia lists since 1960 (the last 50 or so years), ~79 successful attacks (I may have miscounted by a couple and don’t really have time to look at the unsuccessful attempts), a quick perusal through those show that the vast majority are domestic terrorist organizations, most of whom would be unlikely to have spoken Arabic during there attacks.
The numbers from the report you cited were for attacks worldwide, against any target. A closer look limiting ourselves to attacks on US soil shows a different picture.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/04/the-saudi-marathon-man.html
Was his the rational basis? How much time was there to even have found a ‘rational” basis?
“There must be enough evidence to keep him there,” Andrew Napolitano said on “Fox and Friends”—“there” being the hospital. “They must be learning information which is of a suspicious nature,” Steve Doocy interjected. “If he was clearly innocent, would they have been able to search his house?” Napolitano thought that a judge would take any reason at a moment like this, but there had to be “something”—maybe he appeared “deceitful.” As Mediaite pointed out, Megyn Kelly put a slight break on it (as she has been known to do) by asking if there might have been some “racial profiling,” but then, after a round of speculation about his visa (Napolitano: “Was he a real student, or was that a front?”), she asked, “What’s the story on his ability to lawyer up?”
By Tuesday afternoon, the fever had broken. Report after report said that he was a witness, not a suspect. “He was just at the wrong place at the wrong time,” a “U.S. official” told CNN. (So were a lot of people at the marathon.) Even Fox News reported that he’d been “ruled out.” At a press conference, Governor Deval Patrick spoke, not so obliquely, about being careful not to treat “categories of people in uncharitable ways.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/mississippi-man-arrested-ricin-scare/story?id=18978412#.UW8-mXTD_GJ
Not a Saudi, not an Arab but a terrorist none the less.