Via CNN: ‘Safest’ seat remarks get Muslim family kicked off plane
Atif Irfan, his brother, their wives, a sister and three children were headed to Orlando to meet with family and attend a religious conference.“The conversation, as we were walking through the plane trying to find our seats, was just about where the safest place in an airplane is,” Sahin said. “We were (discussing whether it was safest to sit near) the wing, or the engine or the back or the front, but that’s it. We didn’t say anything else that would raise any suspicion.”
The conversation did not contain the words “bomb,” “explosion,” “terror” or other words that might have aroused suspicion, Irfan said.
“When we were talking, when we turned around, I noticed a couple of girls kind of snapped their heads,” said Sobia Ijaz, Irfan’s wife. “I kind of thought to myself, ‘Oh, you know, maybe they’re going to say something.’ It didn’t occur to me that they were going to make it such a big issue.”
Some time later, while the plane was still at the gate, an FBI agent boarded the plane and asked Irfan and his wife to leave the plane. The rest of the family was removed 15 or 20 minutes later, along with a family friend, Abdul Aziz, a Library of Congress attorney and family friend who was coincidentally taking the same flight and had been seen talking to the family.
After the FBI interviewed family members, it released them, Irfan said.
Now, there is little doubt that one has to be ridiculously careful about what one talks about on a plane/in an airport these days. By the same token, this was hardly a threatening conversation and the bottom line is that were these people not visibly Muslim (i.e, men with beards, women with headscarves) the conversation would not have resulted in the family being removed from the flight.
As such, the statement from AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson is a bit disingenuous (to put it mildly):
“At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn’t have made on the airplane, and other people heard them,” Hutcheson said. “Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions.”
Yes, it “just so happened” that they “were of Muslim faith and appearance.” That was just a footnote to the whole thing. Since when is it verboten to comment about the safest seat on the plane?
First, I personally can remember having similar conversations with my wife on planes in the past. Once, upon discovering that we we were in the very last row of the plane (a pain when it comes time to deplane) I remarked that I had read that the safest place on the plane was the tail. On another occasion I recall discussing something I had read about the relative safety of being in the plane’s restroom during a crash (I haven’t the foggiest idea, btw, as to whether either of those things are true, or where I read them). I have, further, commented at times about sitting over the wing as well as sitting on the emergency exit row. In other words, this hardly rates as a radically unusually conversation and certainly isn’t the same as “Say, Achmed, did you properly stow the bomb in your suitcase?” or “Did you manage to smuggle those boxcutter onto the plane?”
Second, why in the world would a set of terrorists come onto the plane and call attention to themselves by talking about the safest place to sit on the plane? Beyond that, did the passengers, AirTran officials and the air marshals actually think that these people planned to blow up the plane and ride the wreckage to the ground? Last time I checked, radical jihadists weren’t too concerned about surviving their attacks.
While I understand the desire to be safe in regards to airplanes, this is a pretty egregious example of maltreating fellow Americans quite poorly simply because of their religion/appearance.
Beyond that, the overall performance by the government here underscore the asininity of many of the rules that are supposed to “keep us safe.”
For example, the best the TSA spokesperson could come up with was basically an endorsement of the action (via WaPo):
Ellen Howe, a spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration, said the pilot acted appropriately.“For us, it just highlights that security is everybody’s responsibility,” Howe said. “Someone heard something that was inappropriate, and then the airline decided to act on it. We certainly support [the pilot's] call to do that.”
Give the FBI credit, however (from the CNN piece):
Family members said FBI agents tried to work it out with the airline, but to no avail.“The FBI agents actually cleared our names,” said Inayet Sahin, Irfan’s sister-in-law. “They went on our behalf and spoke to the airlines and said, ‘There is no suspicious activity here. They are clear. Please let them get on a flight so they can go on their vacation,’ and they still refused.”
“The airline told us that we can’t fly their airline,” Irfan said.
I know that a lot of people will dismiss this story because of such glib statements such as “better safe than sorry” or will not mind that these people were harassed because they are Muslims. However, this is, instead, the harassment of innocent American citizens for no other reason than paranoia. This should be of concern to us all. Certainly these actions hardly bespeak of American values such as freedom of speech, religious tolerance and presumption of innocence (let alone common sense).
And, there is also the fact that 100+ additional passengers were frightened and inconvenienced for no good reason (the plane was cleared and passengers were re-screened).
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January 2nd, 2009 at 11:52 am
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January 2nd, 2009 at 1:00 pm
60 Minutes did a good story a couple of weeks ago about how far TSA still has to go to catch all the things people accidentally smuggle aboard airplanes. They should be more concerned with that than a family’s conversation about where they sit on the plane.
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Well said, the only bright thing about is the FBI apparently figured it all out very quickly.
Still, its wrong this happened and it adds one more pebble to the wrong side of the balance between liberty and safety.
January 2nd, 2009 at 3:13 pm
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January 3rd, 2009 at 5:17 am
nice, reasonable, and (maybe too) moderate analyis, ST.
January 3rd, 2009 at 9:01 am
Ignorance strikes again. I commend the FBI for responding to a claim and then fighting for the family trying to clear their names with the airline once they figured out it was a mistake. The airline, while can be forgiven for partaking in the witch hunt, failed to conduct themselves professionally after the FBI cleared the family.