WASHINGTON: Flying in or around America? Watch what you wear. And the language you speak. And your facial hair. And if you are in a clique.
To the chronicles of Islamophobia in the United States, add foreign tongue, particularly if it sounds like Arabic. A college student who came to the US as a refugee from Iraq was evicted from a Southwest flight earlier this month after a passenger became alarmed when she heard him speak Arabic.
The student, Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a senior at University of California, Berkeley, was talking excitedly to his uncle, a political analyst in Baghdad, from an Oakland bound flight, telling him about attending an event featuring UN secretary general Ban Ki Moon, when a co-passenger turned around in her seat and began staring at him.
Uh oh, thought Makhzoomi, here comes trouble, even as he quickly finished the call telling his uncle that "inshallah" he would call again when he landed. Sure enough, the passenger had told the crew that she had h eard Makhzoomi make "potentially threatening comments".
Since the plane was still on the ground in Los Angeles, Makhzoomi was offloaded. A ground crew member who spoke Arabic was called to the boarding area to quiz the student, a Berkeley senior doing a double major in political science and Near Eastern studies. Three police officers had arrived at the scene by then.
The ground agent began to interrogate Makhzoomi, asking him why he was speaking in Arabic. "He spoke to me like I was an animal ... and I said to him 'This is what Islamophobia got this country into,'" Makhdoomi told the New York Times, among several outlets that highlighted yet another case of racial and religious profiling on flights in the US.The airline staff apparently resented the comment, and Makhzoomi was not allowed to re-board the flight.
The incident is just one of latest in a series where "foreign" looking persons have been offloaded from flights. Last week, the same airline got flak after offloading a Somali woman wearing a hijab who asked to change her seats because she was in a center seat between two men. Earlier this year, Waris Ahluwalia, a Sikh actor, was not allowed to board an AeroMexico flight after he reportedly declined to remove his turban for a security search. AeroMexico later apologized for the slight, and typically, so have other airlines for such crew infractions. But the incidents continue.
Crew members are in a bind: they have to take cognizance of complaints from fellow passengers and make split second decisions about whether or not to allow "suspicious" passengers to continue their journey, given the plethora of incidents ranging from the shoe-bomber to undiebomber episodes. They err on the side of caution -and succumb to the profiling instincts of some co-passengers — with token apologies to follow.
In Makhzoomi's case, he has been denied even that. Southwest maintained in a statement that he was removed for "potentially threatening comments made aboard our aircraft" and that it does not tolerate discrimination. It did not elaborate on what the threatening comments were.
"We wouldn't remove passengers from flights without a collaborative decision rooted in established procedures," the company said. "We regret any less than positive experience onboard our aircraft." And the decision to offload the hijab clad woman?
"We are not in the business of removing passengers without reason," the airline said.
Source → On US flights, Arabic and hijab trigger Islamophobia
