Jewish Man Removed from Plane for Praying
Jewish man removed from airplane for praying
I laughed out loud the first time I read this but then after re-reading it, it is quite scary. Again, like Monarch Airlines, the man was removed because of the prejudiced fears of the passengers. This poor Hasidic Jew was reading his book and moving around a little (watch out my dear Sufi brothers). Will we be allowed read Qur'an anymore aboard a flight?
But the scariest element was this quotation:
"The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn't a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave," Faguy said.
This is so ironic but indicative of where profiling will lead to. Throughout history whenever laws have been brought in to target any specific community, that community has been pretty much wiped out yet the laws have remained, only to be used against other communities in the future. The laws which criminalised the black and Irish communities in Britain decades ago in Britain are still with us today and used against the Muslim community.
That anti-terror laws are now being used against Holocaust survivors such as Walter Wolfgang and anti-war protestors shows that it is in everyone's best interests to challenge these laws with the Muslim community.
Please send an email of complaint to Air Canada Jazz's president Joseph Randell on
joseph.randell@flyjazz.ca
A recent poll by the Evening Standard reported that 1 in 6 Londoners were afraid to sit next to passengers they believed to be Muslims (i wonder how many Muslims were polled, knowing that 1 in 7 Londoners is a Muslim) - I wonder how many would be afraid to sit next to a Hasidic Jew!
posted by Abu Abdullah @ 7:51 a.m.
2 comments
2 Comments:
Flabbergasted
Interesting comment by IHRC on this:
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) is deeply concerned at the removal of a Jewish passenger from an Air Canada Jazz flight for praying. The man, a Hassidic Jew, was removed after passengers complained to a flight attendant that his praying was making them nervous.
IHRC is also very worried about a statement allegedly made by the flight attendant who removed the passenger. According to a witness to the incident, she told the passenger that she recognized that he wasn’t a Muslim but apologized that they had to take this action. Such as statement implies that had the passenger been a Muslim, there would have been no need to apologise.
IHRC Chair Massoud Shadjareh stated:
“One of the hidden dangers of Muslim profiling and other aspects of institutional Islamophobia is that it creates an atmosphere in which other forms of intolerance and anti-religious hostility is legitimised.”
According to newspaper reports, Air Canada Jazz spokesperson Manon Stewart said that the crew had to act in the interest of the majority of the passengers. IHRC believes that this was the very attitude which created the atmosphere that allowed genocide to take place in Nazi Germany, Rwanda and the Balkans.
http://www.ihrc.org.uk/show.php?id=2083
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