CAIR To File Complaint Over Imams Being Removed From Minneapolis Flight
Posted on November 21, 2006
Update: Two of the Imams are affiliated with terror-linked organizations. Heh, and they are calling for a boycott of the airlines. AJ Strata thinks the whole thing smells fishy.
KSTP
Six Muslim imams on Monday were removed from a US Airways flight at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport and questioned by police for several hours before being released, a leader of the group said.
The six were among passengers who boarded Flight 300, bound for Phoenix, around 6:30 p.m., airport spokesman Pat Hogan said.
A passenger initially raised concerns about the group through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways. She said police were called after the captain and airport security workers asked the men to leave the plane and the men refused.
“They took us off the plane, humiliated us in a very disrespectful way,” said Omar Shahin, of Phoenix.
The six Muslim scholars were returning from a conference in Minneapolis of the North American Imams Federation, said Shahin, president of the group. Five of them were from the Phoenix-Tempe area, while one was from Bakersfield, Calif., he said.
Three of them stood and said their normal evening prayers together on the plane, as 1.7 billion Muslims around the world do every day, Shahin said. He attributed any concerns by passengers or crew to ignorance about Islam.
“I never felt bad in my life like that,” he said. “I never. Six imams. Six leaders in this country. Six scholars in handcuffs. It’s terrible.”
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, expressed anger at the detentions.
“CAIR will be filing a complaint with relevant authorities in the morning over the treatment of the imams to determine whether the incident was caused by anti-Muslim hysteria by the passengers and/or the airline crew,” Hooper said. “Because, unfortunately, this is a growing problem of singling out Muslims or people perceived to be Muslims at airports, and it’s one that we’ve been addressing for some time.”
Robert Spencer agrees on how unfortunate this is:
Indeed. It is terrible. It is terrible to have to do so. It is terrible that these and other scholars have allowed those who commit violence in the name of their religion to do so unimpeded and unchallenged. It is terrible that these and other Islamic scholars have responded only with vilification when asked about the teachings of their faith that promote violence, instead of with honest dialogue and attempts to reform those teachings. It is terrible that they have thereby allowed their religion to become so associated with violence that American citizens on an airplane become alarmed at the sight of Islamic prayer.
It is terrible. But it is completely understandable. And the onus is not on the other passengers and the air marshals or whoever took them off the plane. It is on Muslim spokesmen such as Edina Lekovic, who deny and obfuscate when questioned about Islamic terrorism, instead of discussing it honestly.
Why in the world would Americans be suspicious of Muslims loudly, publicly praying on airplanes? Go figure.
They also point out some of the Imams’ terror connections.
According to the TV, the men said they were in town for “a religious conference.” Interesting. I was talking today with a guy I know; he’d been at a suburban hotel for an annual company sales meeting. The regional manager was having a difficult time speaking, since the party in the next conference room was praying about as loudly as is humanly possible, and had followed the prayers with a speaker who expressed in rather . . . forceful terms the depth of Muslim oppression in America. Unless there are several Muslim religious conferences going on in Minneapolis at the moment, I’d guess that might be the one. If so, I wonder if the reported truculence of the men might have been influenced, or at least reinforced, by the speaker. Whoever he was.
Dr. Sanity has a must read on the essential and rational emotion of fear:
Several options were open to the fellow passengers. First, they could have completely ignored their fear and pretended that it is perfectly normal to have religious observations and chanting to Allah on airplanes. Or, alternatively they could have begun screaming and acting out in an histrionic manner (up to and including physically assaulting the imams because they felt so threatened), in which case, the passengers’ normal fear would have been replaced by hysteria–an emotional overreaction to the unusual activity.
Finally, the passengers could have done exactly what they did. Made the flight crew aware of their anxiety about the behavior and asked the crew to intervene. It is this latter scenario that occurred.
Thus, the imams’ fellow passengers showed a great deal of sensitivity and reasonableness to the insensitive and provocative behavior of these self-absorbed (dare I say narcissistic?) imams, who apparently believe that their particular religious beliefs trump every other consideration and that everyone must concur with their particular…prejudice…on that issue.
Pamela at Atlass Shrugs notes the MSM’s failure to note CAIR’s terror ties.
Others: Hot Air
Gateway Pundit
7.62mm Justice
» Filed Under 1st Amendment, News, War On Terror
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4 Responses to “CAIR To File Complaint Over Imams Being Removed From Minneapolis Flight”
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Syndicate Me
I’m curious as to how he can draw this conclusion when only one of the Imams was named in the article. BTW, Mr. Shahin appears to be exactly the type of moderate that Mr. Spencer is calling for.
I disagree wholeheartedly. The burden of proof has always been on the accuser. It must remain that way.
Exactly.
Respect is a two-way street.
So let me see if I have this right. We have to let the muslims pray on the planes, but we can’t let the Christians pray in the schools?
I have no problem with Muslims praying on planes. The problem is the space level, noise level, and having several individuals stand at the same time in what I might consider to be a threatening move. I am sure that they could of made special requests from the flight attendants and avoided this incident or delayed their prayers until the flight landed. I wonder what Muslims usually do to resolve their need to pray with their being on a plane.