« Trying the gods of air travel | Main | OpenID over WS-Trust? »

Flying While Arabic

From the San Diego Metro News:

An American Airlines flight from Lindbergh Field to Chicago was delayed overnight Tuesday because of a passenger's fright over some Arabic-speaking men on board.

The story itself is fairly surreal -- a bunch of men were talking in a language that sounded like (and apparently was) Arabic, some other passengers got hysteric about terrorism for no good reason, and the plane returned to the gate.

Some of the comments make for even more ghastly reading, and justify racist hysteria with the "better safe than sorry", "think of the children", "we're at war" school of argument.

One thing is for sure: I wouldn't want to sit in the same plane as these commenters.

Later: Yesterday's BoingBoing piece on how people react to fear of death -- in particular as their political views are concerned -- relates to this story in an interesting way. Go read it.

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://log.does-not-exist.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2090

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About

This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on August 31, 2007 9:37 PM.

The previous post in this blog was Trying the gods of air travel.

The next post in this blog is OpenID over WS-Trust?.

Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.

Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Powered by
Movable Type 3.35