The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
No Academy Awards to be presented for Imams' Staged Victimhood
AJ Strata smelled this stratagem out more than a week ago. The fact is, there are so many discrepancies between what the Imams (and CAIR) are saying what happened on the plane and what passengers, ground personnel, security people, and gate employees are saying that one wonders how the Imams and CAIR thought they could get away with lying through their teeth so brazenly.
So either a couple of dozen people who weren’t able to meet in order to get their stories straight on the incident or the six Imams and CAIR are lying.According to witnesses, police reports and aviation security officials, the imams displayed other suspicious behavior.
Three of the men asked for seat-belt extenders, although two flight attendants told police the men were not oversized. One flight attendant told police she “found this unsettling, as crew knew about the six [passengers] on board and where they were sitting.” Rather than attach the extensions, the men placed the straps and buckles on the cabin floor, the flight attendant said.
The imams said they were not discussing politics and only spoke in English, but witnesses told law enforcement that the men spoke in Arabic and English, criticizing the war in Iraq and President Bush, and talking about al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
The imams who claimed two first-class seats said their tickets were upgraded. The gate agent told police that when the imams asked to be upgraded, they were told no such seats were available. Nevertheless, the two men were seated in first class when removed.
A flight attendant said one of the men made two trips to the rear of the plane to talk to the imam during boarding, and again when the flight was delayed because of their behavior. Aviation officials, including air marshals and pilots, said these actions alone would not warrant a second look, but the combination is suspicious.
“That’s like shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. You just can’t do that anymore,” said Robert MacLean, a former air marshal. “They should have been denied boarding and been investigated,” Mr. MacLean said. “It looks like they are trying to create public sympathy or maybe setting someone up for a lawsuit.”
But why? This quote says it all:
Mr. Bray’s colorful characterization aside, he has a point. But not in this context. The fact that so many agree that the imams were being deliberately provocative in order to be booted off the plane could only mean that the “protest” at the ticket counter was a planned event as well, designed to milk the incident with the media for all it was worth.But the imams who were escorted off the flight in handcuffs say they were merely praying before the 6:30 p.m. flight on Nov. 20, and yesterday led a protest by prayer with other religious leaders at the airline’s ticket counter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.
Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, called removing the imams an act of Islamophobia and compared it to racism against blacks.
“It’s a shame that as an African-American and a Muslim I have the double whammy of having to worry about driving while black and flying while Muslim,” Mr. Bray said. The protesters also called on Congress to pass legislation to outlaw passenger profiling.
If the imams were simply praying as they claim, then the actions of the authorities would indeed have to be considered outrageous and ignorant.
But this cheap bit of vaudeville by CAIR and their supporters to try and attach “victimhood” status to their religion in order to get Congress to take the dangerous and unnecessary step of banning the “profiling” of Muslims approaches the absurd. TSA authorities already bend over backwards to give everyone from old, grey grannies to middle aged whites like me the same kind of attention given to Muslim men. The fact that CAIR’s co-religionists are much more likely to blow a plane out of the sky than little old me seems to be lost on our Muslim brethren. Is CAIR actually saying that a middle aged white man is as likely to hijack a plane as a male Muslim who acts suspiciously like the 9/11 hijackers?
Ethnic minorities whose motherland is fighting Americans do not fare well in this country during a time of war. Just ask the Japanese. Or the Germans for that matter. To ask people to suspend their vigilance in the name of “fairness” is suicidal. No one has suggested rounding up Muslims and penning them in concentration camps. So it would seem a logical course of action (and simple, common sense) to pay closer attention to those whose ethnicity is the same as those who are trying their hardest to kill us.
Does this mean that other ethnic groups – including white middle aged males – aren’t a danger? Of course not. If you want to shut down the air transportation system in this country, you would view everyone with the same amount of scrutiny as we do Muslim males. That simply isn’t going to happen.
I suspect that if we ever do get to the point where Muslim males are not singled out for scrutiny when boarding an aircraft, civil aviation will die. The American people could care less about the sensibilities of Muslims as it relates to keeping hijackers off of airplanes that they want to fly on. They don’t care to commit suicide in the name of some nebulous kind of political correctness that flies in the face of logic and common sense. And as long as Muslims continue to threaten us, the profiling of Muslim males will continue – and the American people will thank the government for doing it.
Either we are at war with those who use Islam as an excuse to murder us or we are not at war and CAIR is correct. You cannot have it both ways and have a viable air transport industry and an American public willing to fly.
The professional victimologists at CAIR think that they can put on this idiotic production and rally the American people to their cause. They have, as usual, miscalculated badly. And if this Muslim “civil rights” organization spent 1/10 the time it spends on weeping about “Islamaphobia” as it could on denouncing without reservation or qualification the madmen who seek to destroy us, people would probably listen more closely to what they had to say.
UPDATE Jay at STACLU reports that CAIR is filing a complaint “with the relevant authorities” over the treatment of the imams:
Six actors in search of a play.Three of them stood and said their normal evening prayers together on the plane, as 1.7 billion Muslims around the world do every day, Shahin said. He attributed any concerns by passengers or crew to ignorance about Islam.
“I never felt bad in my life like that,” he said. “I never. Six imams. Six leaders in this country. Six scholars in handcuffs. It’s terrible.”
