stereotyping is not some evil thing. we've become petty and hypocritical if we think it is. stereotyping doesnt mean I hate and want to kill. stereotyping is some senstive baby word created for senstive babies who look to get offended. If people who stereotype get your passions flowing then there is a lesson to be learned there. Don't know what it is, but i'm sure theres one. People stereotype throughout their lives, and if you say you never have or never do, then you are no good liar. It's part of mankinds consciouness, and if you can't let go the of the whole egotistical thought process then you can't let go just part of it, the stereotypical part. If you believe one way, and somebody believes another, which happens every moment of our lives, then the stereotypical process begins - oh, she said she's a veggie, damn tree hugger, then another fragment of the mind says dont say that, your stereotyping, not all veggies are treehuggers. Or theres a white guy, fragment of the mind says, then he can't dance, uh, stereotype. stereotyping, yeah we can work on it, but it seems part of life.
**As long as there not in large groups on a single plane, and heading to the toilet every 5 seconds. And as long as they don't give eachother funny stares and secretly converse in Arabic on the plane. Thats a no no right there, I may have to rush them.** Heaven forbid that a music band (usually more than one person) should travel together. Would you prefer that airlines adopted a new policy whereby no more than two or three Arabs at a time were allowed to fly? Maybe you'd prefer if none were allowed to fly at all. Also, they had no right to speak in another language. How dare they speak in a language which you don't understand? You would have had every right to rush and tackle them to the ground. Let's just hope I never speak Spanish around you. Maybe I would be safe, however, since you've made it clear that your bigotry is limited to Arabs. **First off I don't care much for my life as much as I do for the person next to me.** Unless that person happens to be of Middle Eastern descent? **But hey, with my stereotyping(i'll run that word into the grave), just a very weak principled man it seems, but theres a big difference between my stereotyping than the Arab terrorists stereotyping. My stereotyping just hurts sensitive mens feelings. Their stereoytping, leads them to look at all American citizens as people who they need to kill. My stereotyping while hurting mens feelings saves people lives, while theirs intends to kill people.** You'll receive no argument from me here. The idea that America is the Great White Devil is propaganda, plain and simple. At the same time, by no means does that give us the right to respond with propaganda. Also, your fear of Arabs is not saving anyone's life, despite what you'd like to think. **No, you're merely. I'm not merely ****. I think about it all the time. The flight. The firefighters, the policeman, the innocent women and children on the flight, the people jumping out of the building.** Humanitarian that you are, do these same torturing images haunt you when you see them about Israelis? How about dead Palestinians? Do these fatalities bother you? Terrorism is not limited to our country. We got a taste of that in 2001. Guess what? We haven't had much of a taste of it since. Or in the years preceding it. It was an isolated incident, that a few people tried to capitalize on afterwards. If there is any more terrorism waiting to surface, it won't be in the form of planes crashed into buildings. It'll be chemical plants exploding, or maybe trains crashing (Amtrak disasters?). So give the Arabs a break. They deserve frequent flier miles as much as you do. **Is it such a hit on our freedoms, if an Arab is on a flight, our mental antenna goes up, that our juices may flow a little more and we are aware of a possible threat on board? we're not rude or cruel to arab men on the plane, nobodys going to throw nuts at him and jeer at him and chant God is Great down with the damn Arab. ** Is it a hit on your freedoms? By no means. The freedoms of our Arab citizens is a different matter entirely. And while you may not throw nuts at Arabs on your plane, by your own account, you are perfectly ready, willing, and able to tackle him if he speaks in a different language, makes eye contact with other degenerates like himself, or uses the restroom too much. **You feel a sense of equal rights for all Americans, I do to, thats what any war I run to fight in will have to be about, and damn me to hell if thats what Im saying to take away, because I'm not.** While I can't argue with your logic, yes, you are taking away rights to all Americans. **I'm saying arabs on airplanes cause Americans to be more alert. And dammit theres nothing wrong with that right now. If you're arab and you don't like that, here's a tissue.** Right now? You act like it happened yesterday. IT WAS NEARLY THREE YEARS AGO. People tend to forget that. Three years. In which time, America has not suffered more terrorist incidents. Yet the paranoia continues. **we're not understanding eachother here. its me, Im not the greatest communicator. See, I want you to feel what I felt on 9/11 and what I still feel and think about. That year I had dreams of the flight, and children screaming, right before it hit the building. I have an audiotape on the comp. of a young man, about my age, trapped on the top floor of the world trade center, who called his girlfriend, left a message on the recorder, telling her he's sorry they have been fighting, and that he loves her, and that a plane just slammed into the building and he's not going to make it, and then nothing but static. See I replay that call in my head a lot. It has effected me more deeply than you. And your out here pushing for the cause that Arabs on airplanes to be thought of, to be thought of, by American citizens as what, what do you want us to think or not think, that Arabs on airplanes not be thought as possible threats, thats not going to happen for awhile, even Thomas Paine would have a hard time with that one. ** What about the mother who goes for lunch in a cafe in the Middle East, only to have a truck drive into the restaurant, exploding and killing everyone? What about the children onboard the buses that get hijacked and/or destroyed overseas? What about the innocent Embassy employees who are victims of terrorism? Why does 9/11 stick out for you so much? Because you're an American? Well I'm a human. And I believe in rights for humanity, not just American superiority. I don't believe you would be out rallying to stop terrorism if 9/11 had never happened. Instead it would just be, "Oh well, I guess a bunch of towel heads blew themselves up" and you would go on about your business. Nothing like self-interest to motivate someone to fix a problem. But then you turn around and only try to fix that problem for yourself. **Here is where you and me most differ. It wasn't someone elses plane. And it wasn't some people. It was my innocent fellow country men, women, and children. they were killed because we don't think like they think, we don't worship the god they worship, we don't look they way they look, and on and on with the their forced doctrine for the world that was made in hell. These cowards are the bigots, these are the racists. I will never forget it. It was a experience for me that I will never forget, and if I do ever forget, while living on earth, god help me.** Actually, I'm of the firm belief that they were killed because America can't keep its nose out of the business of others. We've been this industrial, capitalist society for quite some time now. Why wait until 2001 to attack us? It's because only recently (the past couple decades) did we really stick our hands in their soil and try to work things to our advantage. There are so many other countries with different ethnicities, religions, beliefs, laws, and practices than Al Qaeda. Why America? Because we went over there and gave them reason to hate us. I know this will not be popular with a lot of you here, but it's time that we faced the fact that we are too involved globally. Superpower or not, part of being powerful is respecting the less powerful. That includes their right to be autonomous and independent. We can't form the rest of the world into little Mini-Americas, complete with capitalist economies and democratic governments. It's our attempt to that has so angered the Arab nations.
We should only exclude it as a general indicator of who to search. If there are unknown suspects and the description of them states they are of a certain race then of course that should be taken into account. But as a general indicator of who to search, we should exclude race because as history as shown us it won't be successful. Just like in other cases the would be criminals will soon get around profiling.
Ender please learn to use the quote icon properly. It's the fourth one to the right of the date, with the little red arrow pointing to the right. Your current technique is illegible.
Idealogists vs. Realists. I side with the realists. Racial profile at airports, as long as it makes traveling in a plane safer for everyone. Heck search us all, make the lines longer, we will adapt. DD
AIR MARSHALS SAY PASSENGER OVERREACTED By ERIC LEONARD KFI NEWS LOS ANGELES | July 22, 2004 – Undercover federal air marshals on board a June 29 Northwest airlines flight from Detroit to LAX identified themselves after a passenger, “overreacted,” to a group of middle-eastern men on board, federal officials and sources have told KFI NEWS. The passenger, later identified as Annie Jacobsen, was in danger of panicking other passengers and creating a larger problem on the plane, according to a source close to the secretive federal protective service. Jacobsen, a self-described freelance writer, has published two stories about her experience at womenswallstreet.com, a business advice web site designed for women. “The lady was overreacting,” said the source. “A flight attendant was told to tell the passenger to calm down; that there were air marshals on the plane.” The middle eastern men were identified by federal agents as a group of touring musicians travelling to a concert date at a casino, said Air Marshals spokesman Dave Adams. Jacobsen wrote she became alarmed when the men made frequent trips to the lavatory, repeatedly opened and closed the overhead luggage compartments, and appeared to be signaling each other. “Initially it was brought to [the air marshals] attention by a passenger,” Adams said, adding the agents had been watching the men and chose to stay undercover. Jacobsen and her husband had a number of conversations with the flight attendants and gestured towards the men several times, the source said. “In concert with the flight crew, the decision was made to keep [the men] under surveillance since no terrorist or criminal acts were being perpetrated aboard the aircraft; they didn’t interfere with the flight crew,” Adams said. The air marshals did, however, check the bathrooms after the middle-eastern men had spent time inside, Adams said. FBI agents met the plane when it landed in Los Angeles and the men were questioned, and Los Angeles field office spokeswoman Cathy Viray said it’s significant the alarm on the flight came from a passenger. “We have to take all calls seriously, but the passenger was worried, not the flight crew or the federal air marshals,” she said. “The complaint did not stem from the flight crew.” Several people were questioned, she said, but no one was detained. Jacobsen’s husband Kevin told KFI NEWS he approached a man he thought was an air marshal after the flight had landed. “You made me nervous,” Kevin said the air marshal told him. “I was freaking out,” Kevin replied. “We don’t freak out in situations like this,” the air marshal responded. Federal agents later verified the musicians’ story. “We followed up with the casino,” Adams said. A supervisor verified they were playing a concert. A second federal law enforcement source said the concert itself was monitored by an agent. “We also went to the hotel, determined they had checked into the hotel,” Adams said. Each of the men were checked through a series of databases and watch-lists with negative results, he said. The source said the air marshals on the flight were partially concerned Jacobsen’s actions could have been an effort by terrorists or attackers to create a disturbance on the plane to force the agents to identify themselves. Air marshals’ only tactical advantage on a flight is their anonymity, the source said, and Jacobsen could have put the entire flight in danger. “They have to be very cognizant of their surroundings,” spokesman Adams confirmed, “to make sure it isn’t a ruse to try and pull them out of their cover.” KFI reporter Jessica Rosenthal contributed to this report. http://www.kfi640.com/ericleonard.html
July 21, 2004, 7:21 p.m. The Syrian Wayne Newton The man inadvertently behind a scare in the skies. By Clinton W. Taylor Annie Jacobsen's recent piece for WomensWallStreet.Com made waves. Her account of flying with her family while 14 Middle Eastern passengers acted in a threatening and apparently coordinated manner makes for a terrifying read. Her article captures her sickening sense of both uncertainty and inevitability as what might possibly have been the next 9/11 unfolded around her. Fortunately, nothing of the sort happened. On June 29, Northwest Airlines Flight 327 landed safely in Los Angeles and a phalanx of law enforcement greeted the suspicious passengers, whisking them away for some intense interviews. Jacobsen noted a pile of Syrian passports in the hand of a law-enforcement official. But the men checked out, and Jacobsen was told that they were "hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert." She was not told the name of the band, nor the name of the casino. And as her story made the rounds through the Internet and beyond (the Dallas Morning News printed a condensed version earlier this week), a note of skepticism about her story crept in. Had she imagined the whole thing? Or was the government covering up a "dry run" for another terrorist attack? Columnist and blogger Michelle Malkin confirmed some of the details of Jacobsen's story with the Federal Air Marshal's service, but the identity of the band remained the subject of much speculation. For a while the blogosphere settled on a Syrian band called Kulna Sawa as a likely candidate, but the gents at Powerline received a note from that group's tour manager explaining the band was still in Syria when all this happened. Even the mainstream media began to notice the story: New York Times reporter Joe Sharkey confirmed some of the details of the story today but admitted he, too, was unable to identify the band. Well, I am nominally the "news director" for Stanford University's student radio station, KZSU, and I figured I'd help the Times out. There aren't that many casinos in southern California, so I had my research assistant, Mr. Google, take a look at some. An hour later I was talking to the nice folks at Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego. Unlike most casinos where it's all Elvis impersonators, Paul Anka, and Linda Ronstadt — oh, wait, scratch that last one — Sycuan books the occasional "ethnic music" show, too. In August, for example, they'll have a Vietnamese night. "Oh, do you mean Arab music?" inquired Angie, who answered Sycuan's phone. Yes, they had had an Arab act perform on July 1, an artist named Nour Mehana. Terry, Angie's supervisor at Sycuan, confirmed that he was there and that there was probably a backup band brought in, since there's no house band at Sycuan. In fractions of a second, Mr. Google found a website for Sycuan's event promoters, Anthem Artists, whose archive confirms Nour Mehana performed at Sycuan on 7/01/04. And then I noticed something that was truly terrifying, something linking Nour Mehana to a figure of such repulsive evil that I felt a rush of prickly fear not unlike Jacobsen's: Just one week later, the same company that arranged Mehana's performance, also booked Carrot Top! I talked to James Cullen of Anthem Artists who confirms that Nour Mehana's large band did arrive on Northwest Flight 327. Some of them came in from Detroit, and some from Lebanon. Cullen says they never said anything about a disturbance on the flight to him, even though "I stayed in the same hotel, they were nice, they stayed right above me." He said that they were fine musicians, put on a great show, and he would work with them again in the future. Cullen did receive a follow-up e-mail from the Department of Homeland Security, asking him to confirm that the band had played their gig at Sycuan. He had read Jacobsen's article and concluded that some "people are just paranoid." A pilot himself, Cullen insisted that the patterns Jacobsen perceived wouldn't occur to him. "We should take pride in our system. We've got to trust our system." (Cullen made it clear that he opposes "this crazy Bush Iraq war sh*t," but it is important to bear in mind that Cullen also admitted to booking Carrot Top.) Nour Mehana (a.k.a. Noor Mehanna, or Nour Mhanna, plus various permutations of those spellings) is, in fact, Syrian. He performs both "new-agey" hits and old sentimental Middle Eastern classics in a style called Tarab. In this catchy ten-minute video of Mehana on stage, (scroll down; the name is rendered Noor Mhanan this time ) you can see he has a rather large backup band helping him out. (The resolution is low, but Jacobsen might recognize some of the band members Mehanna is interacting with.) Followers of news from Iraq may have heard about the U.S. tour of the "Iraqi Elvis." Well, Mehana comes across not as an angry jihadi, but rather more like the Syrian Wayne Newton. Much more like Wayne Newton: Anyway, this is good news. Nour Mehana's band might have acted like jerks on the plane, but it appears safe to say they were not casing Northwest Airlines for a suicidal assault, and we can quit worrying about this being a "dry run" or an aborted attack. And if Jacobsen was wondering why one man in a dark suit and sunglasses sat in first class while everyone else flew coach, well, it seems pretty clear that this was the Big Mehana himself. Which is definitely not the same as saying Jacobsen was wrong to worry. The proven existence of this band confirms one of the last details of her story, and her story confirms some of our worst fears about airline security. The mindset of passengers, of the crew, and even of the law-enforcement personnel (Jacobsen said a flight attendant reassured her husband by pointing out that air marshals were on the flight), and decision makers higher up the ladder was reactive, not proactive. Now, by that I certainly don't mean that the interceptors should have scrambled or the passengers should have started swinging Chardonnay bottles as soon as the oud player took too long in the john. But evidently no one even engaged these guys in a conversation, and no one, not the flight crew, and not the air marshals, challenged their egregious violations of protocols about congregating near restrooms or standing up in unison as the plane started its descent. Nothing was done to alleviate the terror Jacobsen, and probably a lot of the other passengers, felt. Liberals will likely decry the suspicion and interrogation the musicians faced on Flight 327. And the principled Right will regret that that was necessary. If the band's English wasn't very good they might not have understood the instructions. But a polite word and some helpful gestures earlier on, rather than a guilty PC silence, might have saved them some embarrassment. In any case, the police-state parallels fade quickly: In a real police state, like, oh, Syria, you are not even allowed inside the country with an Israeli stamp in your passport. June 29 was no ordinary day in the skies. That day, Department of Homeland Security officials issued an "unusually specific internal warning," urging customs officials to watch out for Pakistanis with physical signs of rough training in the al Qaeda training camps. The warning specifically mentioned Detroit and Los Angeles's LAX airports, the origin and terminus of NWA flight 327. That means that our air-traffic system was expecting trouble. But rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn't. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Given the information they were working with at the time, almost everyone should have reacted differently than they did. Jacobsen's fear was quite natural under these circumstances, and she has done us a service by pointing out some egregious shortfalls in our airline security. Danke Schoen, Darling. Let's hope the right people are listening. — Clinton W. Taylor is a lawyer and a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. He's also news co-director and an intermittent classic-country DJ for KZSU, Stanford. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/taylor200407211921.asp
I think this thread is an excellent example of what can go wrong because of irrational fear. The best thing about it is that it was all left in the hypothetical. But we had posters saying they would have physically attacked the men had they been on the plane. They would have been attacking an innocent group of musicians travelling to perform. They would have initiated violence on a group of people who were only flying to their job. Things could have sky rocketed from there, with the group feeling they were unfairly targeted because of their nationality and feeling less inclined to friendly or helpful to anglos or even the U.S. govt's war on terror should they happen upon any information. It's also possible that some people's fear gets the better of them, and not held it against folks in the U.S. at large, but who knows how often that kind of thing could have happened to them or would continue to happen. Hopefully all of us will be careful before jumping to conclusions and think before we act. Perhaps this thread will save people some grief, and ill will.
Grossly suspicious behavior is something the FranchiseBlade's of the world will intentionally omit in their ridiculous defense...Let's be real, people... The terrorists who caused over 3,000 civilian deaths here in the homeland are of middle-eastern decent...They should be examined and profiled,...Profile and examine everyone, if it makes you feel better, but a clear indicator of suspicion will be their ethnic decent, as it should be...
Suspicious behavior that trained professionals on the flight did not see as suspicious. The person they saw acting suspiciously and thought might be connected to a terrorist operation was the woman who wrote the article. The defense is that these guys weren't up to anything, the air marshals on board the plane checked the restroom and found nothing. They kept an eye on the passengers, including these guys and didn't find anything extraordinary beyond the lady who wrote the article. An extended search of these guys on the ground before the flight would've ended up with nothing (and likely, the woman still would've freaked out thinking they got something trough security) and even after the FBI has checked them out after the flight and even after nothing happened on the flight, the woman is still fairly convinced these 14 men were terrorists on a dry run. I'm looking forward to her follow-up article telling people to keep an eye on their kidneys when visiting New Orleans. And also, from the original story, we don't know that these guys weren't subjected to increased scrutiny when they went through security orignially. The woman wasn't there at the time, so there's no way to know if they were or weren't subject to detailed searches before getting to the gate.
I agree that we should examine everyone it's the only way to be safe. As the facts of the story have now come out, viewing these guys as suspicious was probably closer to paranoia and irrationality. The middle-easterners were innocent, traveling to work, like many other people who have to fly for business. Yet people got spooked because they were from the middle east, and people on this board claimed that had they been on the jet they would have initiated violence against these innocent people. If the threat of innocent people being beaten because of people's irrational fear of folks from the middle east isn't a sign that we need to take a deeper look at the problem, then I don't know what is. As mr. paige mentioned the only suspicious person was the woman who was paranoid, and jumped to conclusions based on their nationality. This was another example of where profiling woould have been unsuccessful, and where based on the profiling some people would have attacked the men. All the problems with that system have been exposed right here in this thread.
I don't understand what so freaking hard? I mean eliminate all mechanical objects and people arent allowed to have them in passenger seats. They must all have to leave them in their suitcase in the storage area. Voila case solve. All they can use now are fists or other items they could find to fight. F!ck, I don't understand why they can't make that call?
Or how about no other smaller bags, laugages allowed by certain people in passenger seats? Who's going to complain if its teh safety for everyone? What are the terrorists supposed to use? Harsh language?
