Last week, a total of three Muslim imams were denied travel to Charlotte, North Carolina by two different airlines.  One in New York City by American Airlines (who offered no real reason why) and two more by Atlantic Southeast Airlines operating for Delta Airlines (because a pilot felt that some passengers remained uncomfortable with their presence despite not one but two security screenings.)

I’ve already posted about this and I’ve already said shame on Delta.  I’ll say shame on American Airlines as well. 

Focusing on someone’s religion as a security risk is extremely foolhardy.  Ignorance is not an acceptable excuse even where security is concerned.  More importantly, we’ve already experience far too many of these incidents in the past 10 years to excuse flight crew or security personnel behaviour on this subject. 

Denying these people the ability to fly is tantamount to making them second class citizens (whatever their nationality) for no other reason than their religion.   As a nation, we have historically resisted allowing religion to be a reason to persecute someone but in the case of muslims and particularly Muslims wearing traditional robes and headgear, we seem to have suddenly accepted that that is OK.  Just because someone speaks a foreign language (Arabic or any other language indigenous to a Muslim culture), we’ve almost enthusiastically treated those people as security risks.

This is sheer stupidity for two reasons.  First and foremost, it goes against the very grain of our nation and our constitution and the gains we’ve made with respect to civil rights over the past 50 years.  It’s an insult to our national culture and our national laws. 

Second, it shows we aren’t being objective about our security concerns.  Good security comes from good objectivity, not subjectivity.   You can no more point to Muslims as a risk by virture of their terrorist acts than you can point to Catholics as being a risk by virture of the terrorist acts of the IRA.  In fact, I would point out that if that was valid criteria, you would actually be at greater risk from Irish Catholics than you would a Muslim from Yemen because the Irish Catholic can far more easily “blend in” with our national background. 

As far as I can tell, we don’t ban Irish Catholics from flights because of their religion or accent.  Oddly enough, we do not even ban Hindi people because of their association with violent Hindu extremists. 

I blame the government for promoting this behaviour but I particularly blame the airlines for allowing their staff to practice it.   The best and only response to either of the incidents from last week would have been to find a flight crew that has good sense and board these people for their flights.  Tolerating this racism within a company is stupid and bad business.

An abundance of cautiou doesn’t mean you get to give into predjudice.  And let me point out that if we continue to tolerate this, there is no reason that some other class of people can’t be identified in the future to practice this predjudice against.  That class could be white women over 50 or black children or hispanic males over 20 or white men between 30 and 40.  You aren’t immune to this potential.

Then there is Rageh Al-Murisi, the man who banged on an American Airlines cockpit door on a flight to San Francisco.  It’s notable that this man wasn’t dressed in a way that would particularly identify him as a Muslim or an imam and he got onto his plane.

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