Posted on 07/30/2004 2:04:45 PM PDT by johnny7
What I don't get is why acting like those guys did on the plane isn't enough to get you picked up and deported, regardless of your visa status. Anyone who acts like that on a commercial airline flight and scares the hell out of the other passengers ought to be, at the least, asked to leave our country and put on a do-not-admit-ever-again list. After I read the letter in the Washington Times, I decided that jerk should be deported too. He has NO RIGHT TO BE HERE.
I think they've handled this story really well.
Moustapha's lies darken the whole episode.
Reference bump.
Bump for Annie Jacobsen.
This story gets wierder and weirder...(if that's a word.) Those "gentlemen" -- and I use the term loosely -- are here because we ALLOW it, not because they have a RIGHT to be here. Their visas can and should be yanked. And I'd say the same thing if they behaved in this manner and were whitebread looking folks from New Zealand...so again, it's not the heritage, it's the actions. The RIGHTS afforded these folks on visas are a GIFT, not something they are born into, unlike the natural and naturalized US citizens.
I have a suspician: (1) these guys were muscians; (2) they know people were afraid of them; and (3) they decided to have a little "fun" with the Americans by acting REALLY suspicious (e.g., chorigraphed going to the bathroom, leaving McDonald's bag behind in the lavatory); and (4) things spiralled out of control.
JMHO
I can't believe the gall of this guy making up out of whole cloth something like "they have performed in the past six months in places such as the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center and the Juilliard School". Kudos to Mrs. Jacobson if only for exposing that lie.
A lot of people have taken it upon themselves to amateur-psychoanalyze Mrs. Jacobson and (without evidence at all) declare her to have been simply panicky and hysterical on this flight and thus not reporting anything accurately. But the more her concerns are waved away with cries of "racist", sloppy thinking, and out and out lies, the more I think something really was fishy on that flight.
It's never been at all clear to me why the discovery that these 14 men really did play music at a club in Los Angeles, precludes them (or at least some of them) from having been terrorists performing a dry run. For some reason the concept "maybe it was both" seems to be lost on a lot of people.
(A lot of whom are the same people who think that "Saddam sought uranium" and "such-and-such document was a forgery" can't both be true at the same time, either.)
When will a sufficient number of us grow up from this sloppy-ass thinking? When it's too late? Or sooner than that? Let's hope the latter.
Too bad no one will probably ever even try to find them, because we don't seem to have any tough monkeys left in Congress, the Justice Department, or the INS. If they have all disappeared now, they may well have been terrorists.
i agree, angela. and i wonder if fighter jets were sent to escort the flight.
Bump for later.
Dr. Imad Moustapha, the United States Ambassador of Syria
the Syrian Ambassador to the United States....
not very diplomatic was he?
Perhaps, another: would they have even been allowed on an Israeli El Al flight in the first place?
Yep, knowing *sshole musicians, and knowing Arabs, I think your theory is the leading contender.
I expect that this behavior, done with any frequency amongst fliers, would produce changes in airline policies.
Bump!
Political correctness will be the death of this country.
Yet naive if she thinks anyone on "the hill" will actually DO anything!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.