How about where did they pray before last week. This seems to be a brand-new age-old tradition.
A related story.
Best of the Web Today - November 24, 2006
By JAMES TARANTO
Why We Hate Identity Politics
Our item Wednesday about an incident in which airline passengers were alarmed by a group of imams praying in Arabic brought this interesting comment from reader Dennis Gibb:
Recently, my wife and I were on a trip to Europe and we changed planes at Kennedy Airport. When we reported for our overseas flight, we found that we were accompanied by a large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews, who are a familiar sight in New York with their beards, long sideburns, black clothing and hats.
As we sat waiting for the flight, the rabbi with the Jewish men announced that they were all going to perform their normal sundown prayer early because they did not want to frighten anyone on the plane with what might, to the uninformed, have sounded like an Arabic prayer.
It is so PC that these supposed Islamic scholars have so little sensitivity to what is happening in the world that they would insist on imposing actual Arabic prayers on an airplane filled with people uniformed as to the reason or the nature of the activity?
This is an excellent point. Look at the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Web site, and you'll be hard-pressed to find any indication that CAIR cares about the feelings of Americans who, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, have perfectly understandable apprehensions about being on a plane with Arab men chanting "Allah, Allah."
We're not arguing that the passengers were in the right, only that if they overreacted, their overreaction was understandable in light of recent history. By demanding sensitivity while refusing to offer any in return, CAIR is behaving boorishly, abusing the good nature of the American character.
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Next time I fly, I plan to sing hymns in the terminal if I see any muslims praying. Onward Christian Soldiers springs to mind for the first hymn.