Posted on 01/02/2009 9:06:49 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia
WASHINGTON (Jan. 2) - A Muslim family removed from an airliner Thursday after passengers became concerned about their conversation say AirTran officials refused to rebook them, even after FBI investigators cleared them of wrongdoing. Atif Irfan said federal authorities removed eight members of his extended family and a friend after passengers heard them discussing the safest place to sit and misconstrued the nature of the conversation.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.aol.com ...
already posted on this site
Didn’t see it posted with that headline, which is an object lesson in editorial journalism.
Exactly. If I had seen the other articles (I searched on a different title word) I wouldn’t have posted this one . . . nevertheless, it is a different article with a different title.
Please tell me the plane was not in the air at the time. ( ok - that was bad )
So, claiming to have a bomb while in security is a felony.
But, implying that there is danger upon an aircraft, in voices loud enough to be overheard prior to boarding is somehow all a ‘mistake’? Now this GROUP of Muslums are going to demand that they are somehow discriminated against by being denied air travel.
Seems to me this happened recently with another group of travelling Imans, who then decided to sue those who ‘over-heard’ their discussion. This is nothing more than an effort to intimidate other passengers into remaining quiet about any conversation amongst Muslums - which has only a single purpose - to make it easier to commit mass murder again at some point in the future.
There’s a quiz there, and I checked that the authorities acted appropriately.
But the other question, would they have treated a non-Muslim family the same way, I couldn’t answer. Sorry, but I happen to believe in profiling Muslims, considering their record, at least until Muslims stop killing and blowing people up at the drop of a hat—which is unlikely to be anytime soon, since they’ve been doing it for a millennium and a half.
But the question isn’t phrased so I can say that.
It doesn’t say, was the airline filled? Would moving them to another flight have bumped SOMEONE ELSE?
“I guess it’s just a situation of guilt by association,” Aziz said. “They see one Muslim talking to another Muslim and they automatically assume something wrong is going on.”
And rightly so. I suspect there’s more to this story than the taqqiya allows.
In hindsight (post FBI investigation), it seems likely that this family was just having an ordinary conversation, such as many fliers have had at one time or another, about the safest place to sit on an aircraft. This topic has been covered in in mainstream, general interest newspapers and magazines, and some nervous fliers take it quite seriously, and make seat assignment requests accordingly. People who are planning to blow up a plane in flight are unlikely to be concerned about where the safest seats are, since they'd be planning to die anyway.
However, I think their conversation was only a small part of why they seemed suspicious. Any conversation involving a number of apparently or obviously Muslim people, including at least one who had apparently not boarded as part of the family group and was seated in a different location, raises a red flag about some sort of coordinated activity being planned, with purposeful seating at different locations in the cabin.
It sounds like AirTran just had some internal miscommunication re whether to put them on a later flight. They were cleared by the FBI, then refused rebooking on AirTran, but now AirTran says they're welcome on its flights. Of course they are -- once FBI/Homeland Security says someone is allowed to fly, any commercial passenger airline in the US is required to carry them.
Safest place to sit? I wouldn’t know. When I flew a lot for business, the company always made me sit in Strapped-to-the-Wing Class.
Yes, another setup.
Scouts Out! Cavalry Ho!
Put ‘em on the next camel leaving town.
How does the photographer know who he’s taking a picture of?
Can these people get any more stupid?
They were kicked off the plane and not rescheduled on the airline. i don’t think they bumped anyone.
Personally if I were in charge of this whole thing, I would have dragged the family off, investigated, and upon confirmation of their dangerous remarks I would have flogged them with a riding crop on the mouth and then stretched them out and flogged them with a whip.
If they sue the people who reported them, I would file charges on behalf of the family for intimidation.
My response to this story is as follows: picture the scene from Animal House where John Belushi, sickened after hearing the crap that Steven Bishop sang on the staircase, couldn’t take it any more, and smashed the guitar into pieces.
After doing so, he said matter-of-factly, “Sorry.”
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