update: typo correction in bold in penultimate paragraph
Pajamas Media has the scoop (including PDFs of witness reports) on the six imams and their extravagant efforts to cause a media sensation about profiling and Islamophobia. The Washington Times report, which I linked to here, is corroborated by the accounts gathered by PJ Media.
Clearly, this event was staged. The participants went to exaggerated lengths to make sure they were noticed. They called attention to themselves as a group in the terminal and then kept attention on themselves individually when they spread out to seats all over the airplane and talked loudly and requested seat belt extenders, which they didn’t need. And after they were detained, they quickly had a lawyer/spokesman at their disposal to make their case…to the media.
At the very best, this incident was designed merely to attract sensational media attention, in order to underscore the evils of profiling in general and of profiling Muslims in particular.
At the very worst, it was “psychological terrorism,” according to one air marshal, designed to intimidate Americans into being even more polite and tolerant than they already are about decidedly odd behavior from “foreigners,” who have a different “culture” and don’t understand “our” ways.
On that phenomenon, see Borat,
Sacha Baron Cohen’s PC Probe Attack (TM) on the limits of Americans’ tolerance of the “Other,” in which he suggests not, as has been claimed, that Americans are intolerant and bigoted (against Jews, for example) but that we are perhaps a little too tolerant, and grotesquely naive…but lovable. So much for the fake PC Probe Attack (TM).
Reading over the witnesses accounts and reports about the “six imams” case, what I find most interesting is that they all describe a number of suspicious things they saw or heard before they (individually) determined that there might be a problem. In other words, no one on the plane—passengers or crew—jumped to conclusions rapidly or panicked or got agitated. The decision to call for the removal of the imams was reached through a consensus, after a number of people connected dots that led them to feel uneasy. The imams weren’t targeted for suspicion; they called attention to themselves.
Another fascinating aspect of these reports is that they show the extent to which individual Americans “profile” their fellow human beings and what role the “profiling” plays in their behavior. All the witnesses knew that the suspicious men were Muslims. That may have been at the foundation of their anxieties, but it was not the thing that made them decide that the six were trouble. It was the behavior of those individual Muslims, not their Muslimhood, that made them suspect.
This proves exactly the opposite of what the six imams and their attorney (and, to a lesser extent, Sacha Baron Cohen, claim. Americans do not appear to be reflexively prejudiced against the “Other.” No—they’re not “Islamophobic,” not even after all the bad press Muslims have gotten, and continue to get, since 9/11. Indeed, they prove to be just as polite as any of Sacha Baron Cohen’s victims.
That does not make them unobservant, or foolish about their personal safety.
