Editorial: Who is walking on eggshells?
The Washington DC Examiner Newspaper
WASHINGTON - The facts pretty much speak for themselves.
An airline gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department that six Muslim men began praying very loudly and repeatedly shouting “Allah” as passengers began boarding Flight 300 bound for Phoenix Nov. 20. The six imams refused to sit on their assigned seats, moving around the cabin and arranging themselves in a pattern reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings. Three asked flight attendants for heavy seat belt extenders, but then didn’t use them to buckle up. Witnesses overheard them talking about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
Such obviously suspicious behavior was deliberately intended to trigger a response from the airline. The motivation became apparent Nov. 28 when members of the Council on American-Islamic Relations held a “pray in” at the U.S. Airways ticket counter at Reagan National Airport to protest the imams’ well-deserved removal from the flight, charging that their civil rights had somehow been violated. CAIR spokeswoman Rabia Ahmed complained that Muslims “have to walk around on eggshells in public” to avoid being “misconstrued as suspicious.”
And Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Falls Church-based Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, called the incident “a gross example of blatant Islamophobia and the violation of the civil rights of Muslim passengers,” characterizing the legitimate concerns of the flight crew and other passengers as “irrational fears.”
That’s obviously bunk and it needs to be debunked right now. The six imams were hardly “walking on eggshells” and their behavior was certainly not “misconstrued” by anybody familiar with what occurred Sept. 11. ...
