Posted on 11/01/2007 7:15:59 PM PDT by Libloather
Arabic-speaking passengers sue American
The Associated Press
DETROIT --Six men of Iraqi descent who were flying home after a stint training Marines sued American Airlines on Thursday, saying employees publicly humiliated them after a passenger expressed concerns about them to security guards.
The men, who sued in U.S. District Court in Detroit alleging racial discrimination, say airline employees grounded their Aug. 28 flight from San Diego to Chicago and detained them, believing they were security risks.
The men, some of whom are U.S. citizens, were returning to the Detroit area after training Marines at Camp Pendleton in California when another passenger expressed concerns to guards partly because she heard the men speaking Arabic.
After taxiing from the gate, pilots returned the plane to the terminal. The six men were segregated and detained while the airline helped more than 100 passengers find hotel rooms, according to a prepared statement from the men.
The suit was filed on behalf of David Al-Watan, Talal Cholagh, Ali Alzerej, Hassan Alzerej, Hussein Alsalih and Mohammad Al-Saedy.
"They treated me like a terrorist," Al-Watan, 30, said in the statement. "We didn't do anything wrong, but they made everybody scared of us."
Flight 590's crew returned the plane to the gate to resolve potential security problems, airline spokesman Tim Wagner said in a statement.
"All passengers disembarked the aircraft after it was determined that it would not be able to redepart because of San Diego International Airport's 11:30 p.m. flight curfew," Wagner said. "Several passengers were briefly interviewed by law enforcement officers. No passenger was arrested."
The six men took flights with the airline the next morning, Wagner said.
The men worked for Defense Training Systems, a unit of International Logistics Services Corp. of Anchorage, Alaska.
..if it happened under the jurisdiction of the 9th circus of appeals, it would
Photoshopped?
Does it have bearing to the Defense, newbie?
[Welcome to FR.]
Notice that the suit was filed in Michiganistan.
Frances Townsend, Karen Hughes
When I lived in Muslim countries, I was harrassed all the time for just being myself. When you are in somebody else’s country, you are going to be misunderstood from time to time. This is going to lead to harsh treatment from time to time. That’s life. If you can’t hack it, stay home.
I learned to be non-aggressive whenever I was out in public. I certainly never went about staring at people aggressively or acting in any way suspiciously with my American friends. If I did, I suspect the goon squad would have picked me up and instructed me in the intricacies of proper behavior. This instruction would have been delivered via rifle butt.
Cross cultural communication will always lead to suspicion and misunderstanding. This is the nature of things. Therefore it is contingent on the visitor to circumscribe his activities to avoid giving offense. This is more than just politeness. This is what you have to do to get through the day.
Learn it, live it, love it. And certainly don’t file a lawsuit over it. Ain’t no jury in the land is going to side with these guys.
While he was growing up, my father's extended family was German Catholics who had been expelled from Russia, living as farmers in Kansas. From 1900 to 1915, they were Germans, and spoke German, even around the house. Then, during WWI, they were Russians, and spoke Russian, even amongst themselves. Starting in 1925, or so, it was back to being German, right up to 1935, when it was back to Russian. They stayed Russian until about 1950, and have been German ever since. Nobody learned to speak English until about 1960.
“I’ll bet a group of German speakers flying from Chicago to New York in 1943 would have spoken in English as a thoughtful gesture to allay the other passengers.”
Back then it would have been a train, but a good point though.
Boo-hoo
Well, that is a pretty big "if", isn't it? And an almost impossible one to prove in court. There are already several accounts that say that there was more than just speaking a foreign language going on.
But my point is that there are always going to be misunderstandings. A visitor in a foreign country must be willing to accept this. If that is not acceptable, he should just stay home.
At the end of the day, if this goes to court, and I suspect it will never get that far, the plaintiffs are going to have a hard time proving that everybody on the aircraft was acting irrationally to a jury that looks an awful lot like the people on that airplane. They will probably just try to shake down the airline for a couple of bucks in a pretrial settlement, but I suspect the airline is not going to be willing to play ball. The airline will want to bring it to trial in order to preserve their ability to operate independently.
It appears that these men are trying to embarrass American Airlines by running to the press with a sob story about how they were mistreated. What they fail to realize is that American Airlines could not ask for better press. Every time a potential customer reads a story about how American Airlines goes the extra mile to protect their passengers, they nod and tell themselves that they are glad somebody is taking security seriously.
American Airlines could not buy such good publicity. This is one case they are not going to settle in order to keep it out of the newspapers.
"These are some of the most pro-American people around," Garcia said. "There's no reason to suspect that these people were a threat on this airline. ... This is the face of prejudice and racism that happens today."
When I fly halfway around the World, I don't assume that everybody will understand me. How come the wife of the President of the United States will willingly put on an abaya while traveling to Saudi Arabia out of exquisite sensitivity to their culture and these guys are not willing to accept it when average Americans do not understand their actions and attitudes to the nth degree?
To answer my question, Laura Bush has brains and sensitivity and class, and these guys, apparently, do not.
The fact of the matter is that the most famous groups of five or six Arabic speaking men who have boarded airliners in the last ten years are the 9/11 hijackers. It is not at all unexpected that average Americans will make this connection. There is nothing racist or prejudiced about it.
Probe, test defenses..........
>> SOME were US CITIZENS yet they were Training with our Marines??? ANd then they SUE?
Too bad for the Marines the order of events wasn’t switched around.
Who’s to say what state of mind these guys had after “training the Marines” and the way it was perceived by the other passengers. DHS may want to leverage the situation and get some behavioral analysis underway. If these guys are really interested in helping the Marines, they don’t need to sue the tax payer at the same time.
I’m sure the Marines overseas aren’t suing Iraqis.
I wonder if it may have been some misunderstandings that got compounded by passengers’ and crew members’ understandable hypervigilance re Arab men, and the Arab men’s understandable tendency to assume that strong reactions to things they hadn’t thought of as out of line or apt to cause alarm, were due to rash assumptions about the intentions of any and all Arab men.
E.g. there are some people, especially women, who are sensitive to being stared at, and quick to assume someone (usually male) is doing that, when the observer really isn’t — maybe he was staring off into space or out the window at something on the tarmac. If the watchee then reacts in some strange way, THAT will cause perfectly normal extra attention from the observer, provoking further strange reaction from the watchee. Then other people start looking at the scene and thinking something weird is going on, and both parties to the original misunderstanding start getting self-conscious, acting nervous, etc.
I actually had something like this happen in my home a couple of years ago. I rent rooms to college students, and there was one young woman who had some psychological issues (though nothing that would have been apparent to a casual observer) and was also, for religious and family experience reasons, very uptight about any male-female interaction. Another young woman had a very nice boyfriend who spent a lot of time in the house, often spending the night. But after a few months, the first young woman got it into her head that he was staring at her (trust me, it wasn’t happening), and got increasingly paranoid about it. She soon started acting very strange just when he’d walk into a room, because she was frankly panicked, despite no rational reason to be.
Needless to say, when you walk into a room where your presence wouldn’t be unexpected, and someone already in the room reacts by immediately freezing up and avoiding any eye contact, THEN you’ll start giving her a long close look to try to figure out what the heck is wrong with her, quite possibly having no inkling that her behavior had anything to do with your own. THAT makes her more paranoid and strange-acting. Then another person walks in and catches sight of this inexplicable scene, and fixes his/her attention on the original two, not knowing quite how to react, and therefore reacting in a way that might look very odd to a casual observer.
Did the female passenger who reported being the object of staring at the start of this, actually have a pre-existing excessive fear about Arab men, instantly assuming that if she saw one, he was very likely a terrorist who was going blow up or crash the plane? Did she therefore freeze and turn her eyes away when he was just walking by normally, causing him to think “WTF?”, and pause next to her, trying to think of something to say to calm her down? Who knows? That sort of scenario is the only one I’ve been able to think of that can accommodate all the information we currently have (assuming that information is all reasonably factual).
Hornitos’ post #42 summed up succinctly what my gut reaction was: “As Judge Judy would say: ‘If it doesn’t make any sense then it’s probably not true.’ I find the premise that the Marines could let slip in some terrorists into their base while strangers on a plane could spot them from 14 rows away without a ring of truth. No one was arrested in this incident.”
As for the Muslim serviceman who tossed a grenade in the tent of some other servicemen, my recollection is that he was not in fact an infiltrator (i.e. had not entered the military with the intention of acting against its interests), but rather had started developing some new attitudes AFTER joining and finding himself as a Muslim who was now viewed as the enemy by other Muslims.
Oh dear, I had such high hopes for you after your first post, but it’s simple. The bedwetters have taken over this country.
My guess is the one hostess pointed at the guy and whispered to her friend “I think he’s looking at me.” The guy noticing somebody is pointing at them, looks at them. The second hostess notices the guy looking at them because they were pointing at him.
Or it could just be a CYA once they found out these guys trained Marines.
Boy there's a name unlikely to win friends amomg Muslim fanatics.
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