How many times has this happened, now, and how many times will it take before the airlines begin feeling embarrassed by it?
A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic.
The UC Berkeley student was calling his uncle to tell him about a speech he had attended by the UN Secretary General, and he was speaking Arabic because that's what his uncle speaks.
He told his uncle about the chicken dinner they were served and the moment when he got to stand up and ask the secretary general a question about the Islamic State, he said. But the conversation seemed troubling to a nearby passenger, who told the crew she overheard him making “potentially threatening comments,” the airline said in a statement.
For this, a Southwest employee was summoned to make sure all of this talk about the United Nations and chicken dinners was on the up-and-up, and we can all spot the moment when things went to hell here.
The man introduced himself in Arabic and then switched to English to ask, “Why were you speaking Arabic in the plane?”
See, they don’t mention that in the pre-flight briefings. Here’s your flotation cushions, no smoking in the bathrooms, and by the way if you speak Foreign here we’re going to turn this whole damn plane around.
Mr. Makhzoomi said he was afraid, and that the employee spoke to him “like I was an animal.”
“I said to him, ‘This is what Islamophobia got this country into,’ and that made him so angry. That is when he told me I could not go back on the plane.”
Which seems very close, coincidentally, to what just happened to Rev. Barber: Racist passenger "reports" someone, upon which that someone finds themselves getting booted by the airline crew for having an opinion about that.
Not for nothing, but all this feeds nicely into my own theory that We Do Not Need An Airline Industry. On a bus or a train you're still allowed to speak whatever language you want and/or give a genteel “Eff you” to people who have a problem with that, but the primary lesson from 9/11 has never gone much deeper than the general feeling that you shouldn't be allowed to be "ethnic" on an airplane. Let's take all the damn air travel subsidies and put them into building some really nice trains. Nobody cares if you carry your own damn bottled water onto a really nice train.