En Route to a Newfound Prejudice

Perhaps it’s time to begin handing out a list of “Do’s and Don’ts” to passengers who “appear” to be Middle Eastern before they board airplanes: Don’t speak in a foreign language. Don’t leave your seat. Don’t converse with anyone or share any reading material.

That may be the only way to avoid the kind of incident that happened at Los Angeles International Airport last weekend, when a family of Afghan refugees--en route to their new home in America--was branded suspicious by fellow passengers and kicked off a plane.

Here’s the account from our newspaper:

Seven people were escorted off an America West flight by armed officers at LAX, after passengers told a flight crew that a male passenger was making them nervous ....

[The flight] was preparing to taxi from the gate when passengers noticed a man, whom they believed to be Middle Eastern, standing up and passing papers to an older man. Flight attendants then alerted the captain, who called in airport police.

The FBI questioned the two adult males, one adult female and four children and released them shortly after .... “There was a determination that there was no real, legitimate concern,” [an] FBI spokesperson said.

Maybe it was the confluence of circumstances that made an innocent gesture seem so threatening. At least that’s the explanation offered by Jim Sabourin, vice president of corporate communications for America West.

“The flight was boarded, everybody’s in their seats, the doors close,” Sabourin said. “There was one gentleman who had changed seats a number of times, then just as the jet was about to begin taxiing, he stood up, went over to [another] passenger, handed him a note of some sort and began conversing in a language unfamiliar to people. The timing of that ... was unsettling to a number of passengers.”

Passengers such as Linda Dow, who clearly saw something ominous in the man’s demeanor. “There was a skinny, black man,” she told reporters that night. “He kept walking up and down the aisle. I thought, ‘This guy is up to something.”’

In fact, the “skinny black man” was a United States resident traveling on a Sudanese passport, unconnected to the refugee family. The family--a mother who is nearly blind, a father crippled by a back injury and four small children--was being brought to the United States for medical treatment by a Christian group working with a national humanitarian agency. Originally from Afghanistan, they have been living in India for several years, awaiting permission to immigrate here as refugees. They will live in the Baltimore area, where a large group of their sponsors was waiting to greet them last weekend.

But their fellow passengers didn’t know any of that. And when a handful complained to flight attendants that the father’s encounter with the dark-skinned man made them nervous, the flight crew notified the captain, “who made what he felt was the best decision, to err on the side of caution and have it checked out,” Sabourin said.

The plane remained on the ground while the family and the other man were escorted off by armed officers. They were questioned briefly and put on another plane to Baltimore later that night. “I am not angry,” the father told reporters. “But it was not right .... “

It’s one of a long list of indignities forced upon “Arab-looking” passengers in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In some cases, pilots and crews have simply refused to fly passengers with Middle Eastern names or appearance. In others, passengers have been asked to leave because of concerns by others on board. Sabourin said, “It’s bound to happen on airplanes today, given what we’ve been through. It’s human nature.

“Crews are caught in the middle,” he said. They don’t want to target innocent people, but neither do they want to take safety risks or alienate skittish passengers, especially with airlines hurting for business.

After weeks spent grounded by their fears, more passengers are mustering the courage to fly. “But many of them are still so nervous, so uncomfortable, that the slightest little thing they view as unusual behavior will cause them to set off a chain of events like this,” he said. “They may be doing their best to be cautious, but they are probably crossing the line in a lot of cases.”

This seems like one of them. A man changing seats, handing someone a piece of paper, speaking in a foreign language--all while the plane is still on the ground. Terrorist behavior? I can’t help but wonder if those gestures would have seemed so ominous if they had been performed by someone who looked more ... well, American. More like, say, Timothy McVeigh.

But then again, maybe Osama bin Laden is recruiting whole families--men in wheelchairs, blind women, little kids--to do his bidding. Or maybe we are being controlled now not by terrorists, but by our own neurotic fears.

Sabourin said several passengers on the flight refused to continue if the immigrant group was not removed. “The ironic thing is that the very behavior that people are engaging in goes against everything this country is based on,” he said. “What people come here for is liberty and freedom. And at times like this, when that is most important, to see people resorting to trying to take some of that freedom away is disappointing.”

And I think those complaining passengers should have been handed their carry-ons and invited to disembark and take the next plane. What we need now is to send a message not to our attackers, but to our fellow Americans: Just as we will not be held hostage by terrorists, neither will we be captives of our own fear and prejudice.

If it is going to make you too nervous to fly with foreigners who stand up on planes, change seats, converse with others, then maybe you should stay at home. Because the threat to our peace of mind cannot be curtailed with the removal of an Arab here and an Arab there. Ask the mother whose child was so frightened last weekend by the sight of policemen storming the airplane’s aisles with guns that she had to leave the airplane along with the Afghan family.

This may be one of those times when we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. So let’s try to choose a course that is not only wise, but right. Because what happened to that family may have been understandable. It may have been human nature. But it was also wrong.