Arab Americans Enduring Hard Stares of Other Fliers

Commercial air travel for Arab Americans has become, at best, an awkward, uncomfortable proposition. Travelers wearing turbans say they are followed by hard, suspicious stares as they move through terminals, and even those in business attire feel a sense of being measured as potential sources of menace.

Since the terrorist hijackings, several passengers have been pulled off flights because they looked Middle Eastern or have names similar to those on an FBI terrorist “associates” list--only to be subsequently cleared.

On Monday night, Ashraf Khan, a 32-year-old San Antonio businessman, was settled in his first-class seat, sipping ice water as he waited to depart from here on the first leg of a two-day journey to his native Pakistan and his brother’s wedding. Then there came an announcement from the cockpit: The flight would be delayed for a moment. Khan thought nothing of it.

“After a few minutes,” he recalled later, “the pilot came up to me. . . . He told me that he’s not safe with me flying to Dallas.”

“What do you have against me?” the incredulous passenger asked.

“He just said, ‘I’m not going to take you. Myself and my crew are not safe flying with you. They don’t feel safe.’ ”

Khan--an 11-year resident of Texas, dressed for travel in slacks, dress shoes and a T-shirt promoting his cellular telephone business--was handed his carry-on bag and escorted back to the terminal. Humiliated and confused, he declined a ticket agent’s offer to search for a seat on another airline. Instead, he called for a ride home. His brother will be married on Friday without him.

“I’m really, really embarrassed,” Khan said in an interview from his business. “I can’t even work or anything. I don’t know what to do.”

Officials with Delta Air Lines, the carrier involved, did not return calls from a reporter.

While sympathetic to flight crew fears and the need to round up anyone culpable in the attacks, some Arab American leaders see the extra scrutiny at airports as part of a broader backlash--one that, in coarser forms, has produced scattered attacks on mosques, physical assaults and threats.

They complain that the several million Arab Americans and traditionally garbed Muslims in this country have become targets of ad hoc profiling. Indeed, the phrase “Flying While Arab” has begun to seep into the national dialogue, an echo of the long-standing African American complaint of being stopped merely for “Driving While Black.”

Given the added tensions, many Arab Americans simply have decided to give up on air travel for now.

“In this atmosphere and climate,” said Michel Shehadeh, West Coast regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “I don’t dare go to the airport. It’s easier to drive than go into a situation where everybody looks at you as if you have a disease.”

Sheik Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, said the Washington-based organization has received about 50 reports from Arab Americans and Muslims complaining of harassment while attempting to travel by air.

“What can we do?” he said the callers ask. “We are afraid to go to the airport.”

Kabbani attended the memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., where, he said, he was among those who prayed privately with President Bush. After the service, he said, federal intelligence officers advised him to drive back to Detroit.

“They said don’t take planes, don’t fly,” recalled Kabbani, who wears a long flowing beard, robe and headdress. “They said there are naive people at the airport who don’t know what they are doing, and you might be harassed.”

So he drove. Somewhere on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he said, other motorists began to make threatening gestures, to glower and curse at him. Before long, his car was stopped by a state trooper, he said. The officer, according to Kabbani, said he had been dispatched to check out “something fishy.” After handing over license and auto registration, Kabbani waited for about 10 minutes and then was told he could resume his trip.

Given the circumstances of the hijackings, some law enforcement officials and security experts maintain that extra scrutiny of Arab-looking passengers, in particular young males, must be expected. This is especially true, they said, given FBI concerns that there might be more terrorist teams still at large, waiting for a chance to strike.

“We’re going to have to look at people from that part of the world with a much more intense magnifying glass than anyone else,” said Neil C. Livingstone, chairman and chief executive of GlobalOptions, an international risk-management firm, and the author of several books on terrorism. “If we were looking for little old Swedish ladies, I’d say we should be spending more time looking at them. We’re not.”

Said Terrence Hamlet, a security guard at Baltimore-Washington International Airport who admits he has been checking Arab-looking passengers more closely since the attacks: “It’s hard and it’s harsh, but that’s the reality.”

Ramona Ripston, executive director of the Southern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that even before the hijackings, people with Middle Eastern origins had complained frequently about being singled out for extra scrutiny at airports.

“That didn’t prevent the tragedy,” Ripston said. “The point is not to make people feel safe, it’s to actually make people safe. It would be a mistake to let our fear deprive people of certain rights and liberties.”

Instead of profiling, Ripston said, authorities should focus on searching all people at airports and plugging security holes.

U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, while calling for expanded law enforcement powers to pursue terrorists, has declared his opposition to racial profiling: “We will have a tough airline security system,” he said earlier this week, “and we will ask everyone to respond to a more secure, more demanding regime that relates to passengers on airlines.”

However, he added, “I believe profiling people based on their race is unconstitutional.”

Despite the official posture, it’s clear that in terminals and aircraft cabins, certain passengers are being looked over with sharper eyes. At Los Angeles International Airport, a federal official who asked not to be identified said there have been instances in which people of Middle Eastern origin have been bumped from several flights in a row.

Some, he said, were permitted to check their bags--thus allowing the luggage to be searched--and reach the entry to the jet way before they were stopped for questioning.

“It’s pure racial profiling,” the official said.

The same official told of a turbaned Sikh--a naturalized U.S. citizen from London--who was followed by officers as he put gas in his rental car before returning the vehicle en route to his flight.

“If I were a passenger watching this I would think, ‘What . . . is going on?’ ” he said. “It goes to show you the attitude around here: Everyone is on edge.”

At Boston’s Logan International Airport--origin of two of the hijacked flights Sept. 11--Arab-looking passengers were pulled off three separate flights last weekend alone, according to various media reports. In each instance, the suspicions of flight crews were determined to be unwarranted.

Earlier this week, authorities boarded AirTran Airways Flight 358 from Savannah, Ga., to Atlanta and took away a passenger. Airport officials told the Savannah Morning News that the man’s name was similar to one on the FBI “watch” list. After questioning, he was cleared and allowed to depart on a later flight.

Among pilots who bear the ultimate responsibility for flight safety, an instinct to exit the plane first and question later is not difficult to understand: “I have talked to some of my buddies,” said a pilot who flies Boeing 737s out of LAX, “and they are checking the passengers with the mind-set that they are looking for a Middle Eastern kind of look.

“I’m not doing that,” the pilot said, asking not to be identified. “Screening is not our job.”

Many passengers--including some Arab Americans--have said in the days since the hijackings that they favor increased security in any form. For his part, Alex Severinsky, an engineer who emigrated from Ukraine 23 years ago, said he actually would welcome suspicious glances coming his way.

“We should learn from Israel,” said Severinsky, who flies on business several times a week, often on international flights. “There, everyone is suspicious of everybody else. . . . We should all be more cautious.”

Not all would agree. In the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX, four men in turbans could be found Wednesday at a food court, picking at Chinese rice dishes and wearing forlorn, wearied expressions.

“We are Sikh,” said an exasperated Josi Singh. “We are from India. But everybody is looking at us as Muslims.”

Singh said that during his visit to Los Angeles, strangers had thrown rocks at him. As he and a relative walked near MacArthur Park on Tuesday, someone else had chucked a bottle their way. And now, outside the terminal, two men had just confronted Singh and his companions, shouting: “What will be your next attack?”

Said Singh’s son-in-law, Sukhvinder Singh: “Everybody is looking at me with the bad eye.”

Ellingwood reported from San Antonio, Riccardi from Los Angeles. Contributing were Times staff writers Michael Finnegan, Peter H. King, Patrick McDonnell, Marisa Schultz and Stephanie Simon.