“Anyone willing to sacrifice liberty for safety deserves neither” - Ben Franklin
This is a rather old story, but I completely agree with the movement that has started because of it. Raed Jarrar, an architect of Iraqi decent, was forced to remove a t-shirt that bore the words “We will not be silent,” otherwise he was not going to be allowed to board his flight. The full story can be read here, here and here, but for those who want the basic information……
Raed Jarrar had cleared security at John F. Kennedy airport in New York for a Jet Blue flight back to his home in California when two men approached him and asked to check his ID and boarding pass. He was told that a number of passengers had complained about his t-shirt and asked him to remove it. He refused arguing that the slogan was not offensive and citing his constitutional rights to free expression, but after an exchange with member of the airline’s staff, he was “persuaded to wear another t-shirt bought for him at the airport shop.”
The phrase “We will not be silent” is a slogan that was made popular by the White Rose dissident group which opposed Nazi rule in Germany. Raed gave a profound insight while speaking with a New York radio station “I grew up and spent my life under authoritarian regimes and I know that these things happen, but I’m shocked that this happened to me here in the US.”
But Raed is not alone, in a seperate incident an Orthodox Jewish man was removed from an Air Canada flight in Montreal for praying. The incident occurred on a September 1st flight from Montreal to New York City. According to CBC News reports, the plane was travelling toward the runway at Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport when eyewitnesses said the Orthodox man began to pray. Yves Faguy was seated nearby and gave his account: “He was clearly a Hasidic Jew…. He wasn’t exactly praying out loud and lurching back and forth.” He continued saying that the action didn’t bother anyone, but a flight attendant appoached the man and told him his praying was making passengers nervous.
“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.”
So wait, let me get this straight, the flight attendant was sorry because he was not a Muslim so she would have been justified in kicking him off the plane? Are we getting closer to having a “Muslims Only” line at airport check-in? Has American learned nothing from the American Indians and the African-Americans?
I am reminded of a story that I read while I was in college about Tecumseh, the great Shawnee warrior, who shouted at William Henry Harrison in the early 1800s, “You killed the son of your God, then you worshipped him when he was dead, and now you kill those who choose not to follow him.”
As a result, a couple of great t-shirts have been created and made available in various languages to protest the racial profiling that is happening in the world’s airports today. You can get an “I am not a terrorist” t-shirt here or a “We will not be silent” t-shirt here.
Bill Maher has the right idea when he said that the most patriotic thing that any American can do nowadays is to riddicule the president just to let the world know that “We are not with stupid.”
Unless America categorically agrees that they are a racist, bigotted people… but then we only need to ask the American Indians, Italians, African Americans and Spanish if that is true or not. Since they have suffered the wrath of racism for so many decades.
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