In an article today, "Don't Bring That Booze into My Taxi," I take up the issue of hacks at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (MSP) and their unwillingness to transport passengers who visibly carry alcohol. Here are some additional points of interest that could not fit the column.
According to one commentator on my website, Wiley Freeman, the two-light solution is already dead, due to taxi industry disapproval. He writes: "It appears the taxi companies feared that taxi customers would boycott the Muslim taxis, identifiable by their lights. They also feared that customers would use other means of transportation."
Neither I nor anyone I queried has ever heard of cabbies in a Muslim-majority city raising an objection to carrying a passenger with liquor. Even Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic Relations acknowledged that the cab drivers at Minneapolis-St. Paul International are the first he's heard objecting to carrying alcohol.
There are reasons to doubt that the drivers' understanding of the Koranic prohibition on alcohol makes sense. The ban on alcohol concerns its consumption, not its transportation. Mohammad Al-Hanooti, a specialist on Islamic law, states that "some Islamic scholars disagree altogether with the Minneapolis Muslim cabbies' interpretation of Islamic law." Al-Hanooti himself explicitly finds that "it is lawful for a Muslim driver to carry a passenger who has alcohol." He dismissed the cabbies' concerns: "They think it is unlawful because they carry this feeling from home, because they come from Muslim countries."
Ironically, Muslim drivers do not object to drunken passengers, just those who are evidently carrying alcohol in bottles.
I raised the prospect of Muslim drivers objecting to – and refusing to transport "women with exposed arms or hair, homosexuals, and unmarried couples." I could have mentioned transgendered individuals, but did not. Today, I learn that this issue has already arisen, not at MSP but in the city of Minneapolis, according to a news report from the local Fox affiliate. (For the article, click here; for the video, here.)
In her bright pink hat, Paula Hare has found herself waiting on her stoop a lot lately, for taxi cabs that never come. Not to avoid confusion, Paula even tells the taxi dispatcher she's transgendered. But on three occasions when the taxi actually showed up, she says Muslim drivers have refused to give her a lift. "This is more than just religion, it's flat out discrimination," Hare said. "And we've got laws against that in this state." The city of Minneapolis says she's right. Of the nearly 2,000 taxis in the Twin Cities metro, estimates are as many as half the drivers are recent immigrants – many Muslim.
The same item reports from MSP: "When FOX 9 stopped by the airport taxi lot to talk about the controversy, we got a near riot. No one said they would give us a ride with a bottle of wine, and they told us to go somewhere else."
Back in 2000, the Council on American-Islamic Relations jumped in to the fray with its usual helpfulness. "There is a large group of Muslims out here," remarked Damon Drake, CAIR's local outreach director. "Now that the Muslims are here, they need to be accommodated." Building on this aggressive attitude, Drake suggested that passengers with alcohol be segregated from everyone else and be handled by "special call" drivers willing to transport alcohol who could jump the line to take them. In proposing this, CAIR not only sought state endorsement for the Muslim prohibition on alcohol but tried to shift the burden of being anomalous and exceptional – not the Muslim driver shunning liquor but the alcohol-consuming passenger.
Passengers reacted with displeasure to the Muslim aggressiveness: "They're really kind of imparting their religious views on the public," said Katie Patterson of McKinley, Texas, who suggested that the cabbies should perhaps "look for other work."
If anything, airline personnel seem to be even less pleased: Eva Buzek, a flight attendant, returned to Minneapolis from a trip to France and encountered five straight taxi drivers who refused to take her home because she was had two bottles of wine in her suitcase. Buzek, an immigrant from Poland, considered this un-American. "I came to this country and I didn't expect anybody to adjust to my needs. I don't want to impose my beliefs on anyone else. That's why I'm in this country, because of the freedom. What's going to be next? ... Do I have to cover my head?"
Non-Muslim taxi drivers at MSP would seem to dislike this situation the most. "To work out here is the choice of the driver," says one of them, Tim Swiler. "We're talking about the choice to run a business. If you choose not to transport alcohol, that's your choice. It's the same choice if you decide not to take someone with a cane or a limp, a toupee or a bad hat. Go to the back of the line."
(October 10, 2006)
After all, there's no reason the already beleaguered airline passenger has to suffer because some stupid Muslims insist on pushing their religious bigotry in people's faces, particularly when it results from a misreading of Islamic tenets.
See how this works for Muslim taxidrivers : large signs on both sides of the doors:
WE RESERVE THE RIGHT
TO REFUSE SERVICE TO INFIDELS
They would find themselves subject to a boycott by default, with some percentage of their potential clientele deciding to reserve the right ALSO to refuse
service, and PAY MONEY to people who find personal fault with them.Their "business" would go down the tubes.And within this micro-model we can see why capitalism works, what it needs to work and what it is that their RELIGION keeps them from achieving: we find ways to give latitude, tolerance
and acceptance to other people, regardless of how they dress, what they look like, or what their "faith" is----
as long as their BEHAVIOR is not disruptive, life-threatening, and they can PAY/ that is called generally
"the social contract". It is something these 7th century minds don't understand just yet. But they DO understand the one-way street as it is practiced by us, in our kid-gloves treatment of them.
I wish I had read the whole post with the other details first. I am going to bookmark this--this whole issue, tiny as it is in this specific application, is just chock-full of significance for this ongoing problem// My first thought was that the ACLU would jump into the breach with offers of help, like the clowns they are, but now I read that CAIR, predictably, finds in this another opportunity to offer a lecture on how the Muslims have to be accommodated. I am just waiting for the tipping point with this organization, CAIR. It is going to happen sooner or later.
Easy solution.
Don't get in a taxi with a muslim. This can work both ways.