A few weeks ago, six imams were removed from an USAIR flight originating from Minneapolis where they had just been attending a conference of Imams held at the Mall of America on building bridges. Their suspicious behavior? Praying out loud while they waited and asking for seatbelt extensions. (Here’s an argument that their behavior was truly suspicious and here’s an argument saying it wasn’t). Coulter: Profiling Muslims is … like profiling the Klan
Before they knew it, airport police swarmed onto the plane, and the six imams were herded out, handcuffed and interrogated for hours… After the FBI cleared them, US Airways still refused to allow them to fly. The imams bought tickets on Northwest Airlines and flew back to Phoenix… [Link]
The event has produced widely differing reactions. Ann Coulter piped up to argue that it is good to profile Muslims and Arabs (she makes little distinction), saying:
After the attacks of 9/11, profiling Muslims is more like profiling the Klan. [Link]
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Washington DC area talk show host Jerry Klein went the other direction, staging an event to demonstrate how deep bigotry towards Muslims was. First he suggested that “all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band,” a suggestion that was supported by manycallers. One went further, saying:
… that tattoos, armbands and other identifying markers such as crescent marks on driver’s licenses, passports and birth certificates did not go far enough. “What good is identifying them?” he asked. “You have to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and Germans…” [Link]
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p>At the end of the hour long show, where many people had called in to argue that visual identification of Muslims would make other Americans safer, the host turned the tables on his callers:
Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. … “I can’t believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said,” he told his audience … “For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people’s bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver’s license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It’s beyond disgusting.
“Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen … We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous…” [Link]
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p>This same debate about difference and disloyalty has now mutated and cropped up in the debate about the swearing in of the first Muslim congressman, Keith Ellison, coincidentally of Minnesota:
When America’s first Muslim congressman, a Democrat from Minnesota, let it be known he will carry a Koran to his swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 4, conservative pundit Dennis Prager called it “an act of hubris … that undermines American civilization.”
In a web column, the talk-show host said, “Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress…” [Link]
What makes this position so interesting is that it is both irrelevant and unconstitutional. It is irrelevant because congressmen do not take an oath on any book at all:
In Congress, newly elected representatives do not put their left hands on any book. They raise their right hands, and are sworn in together as the speaker of the House administers the oath of office. Some do carry a book, according to House historians, and some choose to photograph a private swearing-in afterward with their hand on the Bible. One senator is known to have carried an expanded Bible that included the Book of Mormon. [Link]
So for the purpose of being sworn in you could carry a dictionary with you, it doesn’t matter. The book is just for the photo op. It’s unconstitutional because:
The Constitution says: “The senators and representatives … shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States…” [Link]
Prager may or may not know that, but that’s besides the point. The debate here and above seems to be largely about symbolic loyalty, what it takes to be considered American.
The irony is that in 2000, there was a great pan-conservative movement, created in part by activists like Grover Norquist, where conservative Christians, Jews and Muslims had all found common cause in the Bush Presidency. Six years ago, cultural conservatives would have had less of a problem with Ellison’s actions, as long as he carried a holy book at all. Now, however, lines have been redrawn and the same conservative Muslims who were once seen as allies in the fight against secular humanism and sex education, are now seen as outsiders. To me it just shows how insincere their inclusion was in the first place.
vaat yaar. you got me all excited with the headline, and it turns out to be a post on religions. 🙁
but to add to the thread i believe the guy’s name is grover.
Muslims ==> green flags … I was trying to oblique. Oh well. So much for working on my obliques 😉
It was a bit more than that… not sitting in their assigned seats, asking for seatbelt extensions that they didn’t need (none of them were obese) The official police reports are available here. Some weeks ago a Hasidic Jewish man was removed for praying on a plane . But that didn’t get a second thought from the media or bloggers, even though bigotry against Jews is far greater than towards any other religious group.
it’s a great post ennis… i think it’s time i read the us constitution…
Klein did a Borat on his listeners ..clever guy 🙂
I’m trying to decide what’s scarier: the American xenophobic coalition between conservative religious groups and nationalist anti-immigration types or the European xenophobic coalition between intellectual secularists and religious traditionalists.
Vikram – the links I’ve provided cover both sides of the story. I believe that some were clearly obese, but not all of them. Switching assigned seats is pretty routine, and in this case it involved giving a blind imam a more comfortable seat. Thanks for giving additional links though.
I’ve blogged about a similar incident before concerning a plane that was forced down b/c some of the passengers were davening. If you have a link, I’d love to read more.
“Muslims who were once seen as allies in the fight against secular humanism and sex education, are now seen as outsiders.”
I have been trying to make this point for the last six years ….. Majority of the Muslims oppose all that the Left stands for in this country.
Had there been no 9/11, the Muslims would have been walking hand in hand with the God squad, on topics like abortion and school prayer, etc.
For once, we’re in agreement 😉
However, this isn’t the first time the civil-liberties left has defended groups whose beliefs they oppose. The same thing happened with the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses … That’s the price of supporting equal treatment for all, you might not like some of the groups you have to treat equally.
I had a discussion with a Muslim activist about this topic in 1999, he was convinced they had made a critical breakthrough and I tried to warn him about the possibility he would be used and discarded.
Vikram, from your article:
It seems pretty clear to me that the reason they removed him was that other passengers thought he was a Muslim. I mean “foreign man who doesn’t speak English (or French, since it’s Canada)” + “praying in a loud or obvious way” trips certain triggers.
Here’s why I think this. I almost got thrown off a Spirit Airlines flight for reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” in 2002. I dunno, someone had misinterpreted the title or something, they’d seen the color of my skin, and there you go. I’m facing a stewardess who’s saying “you’re making some of the other passengers a little uncomfortable”. Luckily, she took the book up to the pilot who apparently laughed in her face, but I spent the next 2 and a half hours being watched like a hawk, having been outed as a potential jihadi or something.
The moral is that people can be utter idiots and are not as capable of making divisions between Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, etc… as it might seem.
Here is a photo of the imams. You can judge yourself about the need for seat belt extensions. And some reporting from Minneapolis…
After reading several sources it is clear that imams did exhibit some suspicious behavior. But I think it was unfair (and may be illegal) that US airways refused to fly them even after FBI clearance.
Yes, switching seats is fine if done with the appropriate upgrades and permissions. Apparently the gate agent told them no first class seats were available and yet two imams were found sitting there, in violation of the directive from the airline staff.
The issue is that the imams claim it was their praying that got them evicted, while leaving out explaining their pattern of coordinated behavior (seating changes without permission, seat extensions without needing them, one way tickets etc).
THE Muslims, eh? So where do THE Hindus, THE Jews, and THE Christians stand on these issues? I mean I accept THE God Squad as a homogenous element, but really, if you keep abusing that article, I’m going to petition the FBI to revoke your right to use it.
…oh wait, never mind, I’m one of those pansy-ass lefties who believes in civil liberties
Neal:
I agree with your statement that people can be idiots. And I’m sure other such egregious examples of discrimination will occur in the future. But on the other hand this particular incident strikes me as a intentionally orchestrated by the imams for either a political agenda or financial gain by suing the airline. A few weeks ago there was a story of a jewelry store being robbed by a man dressed in a burqa, as nobody would ask a Muslim woman to reveal her face if dressed that way. There are enough unscrupulous people around who will take advantage of a situation to profit from it. I am going to be sceptical of this incident given the inconsistencies in what the imams have done and said about their behavior till it is proven otherwise.
great post, ennis…what i also thought was laughable was this douchebag claiming that the imams were trying to cash in on the “politically correct lottery.”
More anecdotes regarding anti-Muslim behavior in flight. My friend, who is a native of the Middle East but now married to an a white American and living in the U.S., recently got a call from the FBI but they have to follow up on reports) because they received a call from a woman who was sitting next to her on a flight. The woman reported my friend because she was speaking in a language that wasn’t English and was writing words to the effect of “I learn so much on these trips” in a word processing document on her laptop. The language in question had to do with her personal diary that she keeps electronically, and “learn so much” refers to the trips she takes abroad from the U.S. In fairness, the FBI agent was very apologetic and informed her that he is required to follow up on any call they get.
I think this story is very illustrative of the bigotry and xenophobia that people experience every day. Not only was the person who called the FBI eavesdropping on the conversation, but she was also reading off my friend’s laptop!!! It seems like the nosy neighbors that used to be pure annoyance can now get you into trouble. Remember this the next time you choose to speak in your non-English native tongue on an airplane.
That is the American way…
US has become such a nasty place to live mentally. 9/11 just gave some Americans a reason to hate foreigners. Every hot news is about race and prejudices. Its sick. Yeah there may be some nice people here. But the bigots far outnumber them.
Six years ago, cultural conservatives would have had less of a problem with EllisonÂ’s actions, as long as he carried a holy book at all. Now, however, lines have been redrawn and the same conservative Muslims who were once seen as allies in the fight against secular humanism and sex education, are now seen as outsiders. To me it just shows how insincere their inclusion was in the first place.
This Ellison case is sheer bigotry. And I agree with your last line above. I am copying an op-ed piece written by the sister of one of the pilots killed on 9/11. She argues that the Imams pretty much brought it upon themselves. She uses some strong language that I have highlighted. Is the piece heavy on emotion and light on facts? If she really doesn’t have her facts right, it looks to me she is jumping to conclusion based on some very deepset prejudice. She does make a good argument in the fourth para. WSJ is a paid subscription therefore I copy:
Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! Those are the words that started it all. Six bearded imams are said to have shouted them out while offering evening prayers as they and 141 other passengers waited at the gate for their flight out of Minneapolis International Airport. It was three days before Thanksgiving. Allahu Akbar: God is great.
Initial media reports of the incident did not include the disturbing details about what happened after they boarded US Airways flight 300, but the story quickly went national with provocative headlines: “Six Muslims Ejected from US Air Flight for Praying.” Yes, they were praying — but let’s be clear about this. The very last human sound on the cockpit voice recorder of United flight 93 before it screamed into the ground at 580 miles per hour is the sound of male voices shouting “Allahu Akbar” in a moment of religious ecstasy.
They, too, were praying. The passengers and crew of flight 93 lost their valiant fight to take back the plane just one hour and 20 minutes after it pushed back from the gate. Until the hijackers stormed the cockpit door, they were just a handful of Middle Eastern-looking men on their way to sunny California. So, yes, let’s be exceedingly clear about the whole matter. Some 3,000 men, women and children are dead because the unassuming people on those airplanes did not look at them and see murderers. Or dangerous Arabs. Or fanatical Muslims. They saw a few guys in chinos.
In five years since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. commercial carriers have transported approximately 2.9 billion domestic and international passengers. It is a testament to the flying public, but, most of all, to the flight crews who put those planes into the air and who daily devote themselves to the safety and well-being of their passengers, that they have refused to succumb to ethnic hatred, religious intolerance or irrational fear on those millions of flights. But they have not forgotten the sight of a 200,000-pound aircraft slicing through heavy steel and concrete as easily as a knife through butter. They still remember the voices of men and women in the prime of their lives saying final goodbyes, people who just moments earlier set down their coffee and looked out the window to a beautiful new morning. Today, when travelers and flight crews arrive at the airport, all the overheated rhetoric of the civil rights absolutists, all the empty claims of government career bureaucrats, all the disingenuous promises of the election-focused politicians just fall away. They have families. They have responsibilities. To them, this is not a game or a cause. This is real life.
Given that Islamic terrorists continue their obsession with turning airplanes into weapons of mass destruction, it is nothing short of obscene that these six religious leaders — fresh from attending a conference of the North American Imams Federation, featuring discussions on “Imams and Politics” and “Imams and the Media” — chose to turn that airport into a stage and that airplane into a prop in the service of their need for grievance theater. The reality is, these passengers endured a frightening three-and-a-half hour ordeal, which included a front-to-back sweep of the aircraft with a bomb-sniffing dog, in order to advance the provocative agenda of these imams in, of all the inappropriate places after 9/11, U.S. airports.
“Allahu Akbar” was just the opening act. After boarding, they did not take their assigned seats but dispersed to seats in the first row of first class, in the midcabin exit rows and in the rear — the exact configuration of the 9/11 execution teams. The head of the group, seated closest to the cockpit, and two others asked for a seatbelt extension, kept on board for obese people. A heavy metal buckle at the end of a long strap, it can easily be used as a lethal weapon. The three men rolled them up and placed them on the floor under their seats. And lest this entire incident be written off as simple cultural ignorance, a frightened Arabic-speaking passenger pulled aside a crew member and translated the imams’ suspicious conversations, which included angry denunciations of Americans, furious grumblings about U.S. foreign policy, Osama Bin Laden and “killing Saddam.”
Predictably, these imams and their attorneys now suggest that another passenger who penned a frantic note of warning and slipped it to a flight attendant was somehow a hysterical Islamophobe. Let us remember that but for their performance at the gate this passenger might never have noticed these men or their behavior on board, much less have the slightest clue as to their religion or political passions. Of course, that was the point of the shouting. According to the police report, yet another alarmed passenger who frequently travels to the Middle East described a conversation with one of the imams. The 31-year-old Egyptian expressed fundamentalist Muslim views, and stated the he would go to whatever measures necessary to obey all the tenets set out in the Koran.
The activist Muslim American Society (MAS) issued a press release within hours of the incident, demanding an apology and announcing a “pray-in” at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. Standing just a short distance from the Pentagon, where five years ago black plumes of smoke from the crash of American Airlines flight 77 could be seen for miles, the assembled demonstrators complained that African-American Muslims, accustomed to “driving while black,” must now cope with the injustice of “flying while Muslim.” This brazen two-step is racial politics at its worst; none of the imams are African-American. MAS, which teaches an “Activist Training” program with lessons on “how to talk to the media,” must have been thrilled when one cable news outfit, suckered by the rhetoric, compared the imams’ conduct to that of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her bus seat in the face of institutional racism. One wonders what the parents of the three 11-year-olds who died on flight 77 — all African-American kids on a National Geographic field trip — would make of this stunning comparison.
Today, MAS Executive Director Mahdi Bray says his organization wants more than an apology. He wants to “hit [US Airways] where it hurts, the pocketbook,” and, joined by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), will seek compensation for the imams, civil and federal monetary sanctions, and new, sweeping legislation that will extract even bigger penalties for airlines that engage in “racial and religious profiling.” An investigation by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Civil Rights & Civil Liberties is underway. Not incidentally, it is the “fatwa department” of MAS that pushed for segregated taxi lines that would permit Muslim cab drivers at the Minneapolis airport to reject passengers carrying alcohol.
Here’s what the flying public needs to know about airplanes and civil rights: Once your foot traverses the entranceway of a commercial airliner, you are no longer in a democracy in which everyone gets a vote and minority rights are affirmatively protected in furtherance of fuzzy, ever-shifting social policy. Ultimately, the responsibility for your personal safety and security rests on the shoulders of one person, the pilot in command. His primary job is to safely transport you and your belongings from one place to another. Period.
This is the doctrine of “captain’s authority.” It has a longstanding history and a statutory mandate, further strengthened after 9/11, which recognizes that flight crews are our last line of defense between the kernel of a terrorist plot and its lethal execution. The day we tell the captain of a commercial airliner that he cannot remove a problem passenger unless he divines beyond question what is in that passenger’s head and heart is the day our commercial aviation system begins to crumble. When a passenger’s conduct is so disturbing and disruptive that reasonable, ordinary people fear for their lives, the captain must have the discretionary authority to respond without having to consider equal protection or First Amendment standards about which even trained lawyers with the clarity of hindsight might strongly disagree. The pilot in command can’t get it wrong. At 35,000 feet, when multiple events are rapidly unfolding in real time, there is no room for error.
We have a new, inviolate aviation standard after 9/11, which requires that the captain cannot take that airplane up so long as there are any unresolved issues with respect to the security of his airplane. At altitude, the cockpit door is barred and crews are instructed not to open them no matter what is happening in the cabin behind them. This is an extremely challenging situation for the men and omen who fly those planes, one that those who write federal aviation regulations and the people who agitate for more restrictions on a captain’s authority will never have to face themselves.
Likewise, flight attendants are confined in the back of the plane with upwards of 200 people; they must be the eyes and ears, not just for the pilot but for us all. They are not combat specialists, however, and to compel them to ignore all but the most unambiguous cases of suspicious behavior is to further enable terrorists who act in ways meant to defy easy categorization. As the American Airlines flight attendants who literally jumped on “shoe bomber” Richard Reid demonstrated, cabin crews are sharply attuned to unusual or abnormal behavior and they must not be second-guessed, or hamstrung by misguided notions of political correctness.
Ultimately, the most despicable aspect about the imams’ behavior is that when they pierced the normally quiet hum of a passenger waiting area with shouts of “Allahu Akbar” and deliberately engaged in terrorist-associated behavior that was sure to trigger suspicion, they exploited the fear that began with the Sept. 11 attacks. The imams, experienced travelers all, counted on the security system established after 9/11 to kick in, and now they plan not only to benefit financially from the proper operation of that system but to substantially weaken it — with help from the Saudi-endowed attorneys at CAIR.
US Airways is right to stand by its flight crew. It will be both dangerous and disgraceful if the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Transportation and, ultimately, our federal courts allow aviation security measures put in place after 9/11 to be cynically manipulated in the name of civil right.
Ms. Burlingame, a director of the World Trade Center Memorial Foundation, is the sister of Charles F. “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot of American Airlines flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bad editing in the second sentence there, sorry.
Ennis – “However, this isn’t the first time the civil-liberties left has defended groups whose beliefs they oppose. The same thing happened with the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah’s Witnesses … That’s the price of supporting equal treatment for all, you might not like some of the groups you have to treat equally.”
I have no qualms against the ACLU or the HRW, defending the rights of the disenfranchised, be they Muslims, Gays or Martians. We should all be treated equally, period.
My grouse is against the so called arbiters of the ideological left, who repeatedly refuse to hold the Muslims to the same standard as they do other people.
To wit – I support Gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose. I am also against prayer in school and support strict seperataion between church and state. And yet,because of my support of the Iraq war, I have been labelled a facist, an uncle tom, a house nigger, etc, by some left leaning individuals. While, a Muslim who sides with the reigious right on the social issues listed above, but opposes the Iraq war, only because it is against a Muslim nation, is given a pass.
Vikram:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not jumping to any conclusions on the incident with the imams. There’s enough uncertainty involved that I don’t feel comfortable taking sides on that one.
But I think the underlying issue of ennis’ post is not just that incident. It’s the whole psychology of intolerance and religious bigotry which even makes such an incident plausible. That’s made this country a more and more scary place, even if you’re not a Muslim. And it’s led to other, less ambiguous instances of people being inappropriately targeted due solely to their faith. I think it deserves a great deal of attention.
I wonder what she thinks about 50 years of American foreign policy and the education in the US about other countries and culture.
Ennis –
“For once, we’re in agreement ;)”
I am sure we will have many more.
It is remarkable how Muslims in this country are being discriminated like Jews. If the two groups could band together despite their historic/philosophical differences and educate the people who wish to brand Muslims and put them in camps it would be a wonderful thing and a benefit for all of us who are non white, non WASP Americans.
Any idea which holy book, if any at all, the first congressman of indian (sikh) descent – dalip singh saund – used when being sworn in..
p.s. i hope somebody (bolly or holly) makes a movie on his (fascinating) life, soon.
Unfortunately nobody has the right answer for when something is innocuous and when it isn’twith 100% accuracy (or even 70% accuracy). Two months before 9/11 an FBI field agent alerted Washington headquarters that several Middle Easterners were training at a U.S. aviation school and recommended contacting other schools nationwide where Arabs might be studying. link To single out their behavior would seem like profiling or bigotry too wouldn’t it ? The FBI supposedly did not act on that information for fear of that very accusation.
I wonder what she thinks about 50 years of American foreign policy and the education in the US about other countries and culture
What about it? Please tell me. I am not being sarcastic. I’d like to know. But I am sure you have bigger differences with the man who finally dared to reverse the 50 year of American foreign policy of abetting false stability across the globe.
Listening to Coulter is like listening to Hitler…..in english.
Yeah but if we expend resources to check out every instance someone who “looks Muslim” does anything than anyone could consider suspicious, the signal-to-noise ratio will go into the stratosphere.
Just after 9/11 the radio shows lit up with white people freaking out over all the brown people they saw. Why, they’re running convenience stores (they could be poisoning “real Americans'” food!). They’re working at airports! They’re working at train stations! They’re working at the docks! They live in towns with nuclear power plants! And the infamous, “they’re not speaking English”! I’ve heard white people freaking out about each of these situations, either in person or in the media (radio call-in shows, C-SPAN, etc…). There’s no way any agency could follow up on all of these paranoid delusions in any comprehensive way.
If we could find a way to get people to calm down, drop the racism, and look for real danger signs, I bet we’d improve our ability to actually find the bad guys too.
even though bigotry against Jews is far greater than towards any other religious group.
dude, why do you just make stuff up??? it makes it so hard to take a realist center-right position sometimes.
lol, but seriously anyone who supported the war should be …..
using Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin to say that the right is bigoted is the equivalent of using Ward Churchill to prove that all liberals hate America.
Real danger is hard to spot and the real terrorists are well aware of what passes for real danger. Hence, none of them would ever look like bearded mullahs. Most will rpobably look extremely westernized.
In the past, several passengers have been thrown off the plane because they were drunk and other passengers felt uncomfortable. The risk of people getting blown up on a plane is very real and I would not put it behind the Imams that the whole thing was a deliberate act to provoke at best or an actual reconnaisance mission to sope out security at worst.
One can claim flying while muslim and all that, but when faced with the prospect of 6 people on a plane exhibiting suspicious behavior, a healthy sense of wariness is good for all. Is there going to be unwarranted discrimination – Yes. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles. If you do not want to go through that, and if you think you will be unfairly targetted, avoid trouble.
Nowhere does it say in Islam that one needs to pray loudly. If a bunch of rednecks get on a plane and did similar things (minus the praying) and said nigger this and that, I would like to imagine that they would come under the same treatment.
Ward Churchill does not write best-selling books. Ward Churchill does not get invited to Democratic party events (Coulter made her infamous “show the liberals they can be killed” comments at a meeting of friggin GOPAC with Cheney present in the audience!). Ward Churchill is not identified as a “liberal commentator” on CNN (by other conservatives, including Bob Novak). Ward Churchill is not adored by the liberal blogosphere.
This is a ridiculous argument. Coulter is a mainstream conservative commentator. I would be willing to bet cash money self-identified conservatives agree with her more than, say, Lindsey Graham on most issues (particularly cultural issues). A better analogy would be someone like Michael Moore. But Moore, while he’s controversial, has never said anything as remotely scary as Coulter.
Huh ? Are you serious ? For a guy who goes into paroxyms of ecstacy quoting arcane statistics, you haven’t checked the stats on the FBI web site on hate crimes ? Wonders never cease.
From the 2005 data:
Other years data available here. Knock yourself out.
Vinay – Believe me, I wasn’t complaining, just highlighting the double standard. If one belongs to the minority (religion), a very small minority, in the land where the religion of peace is dominant, one develops a very thick skin. I (a hindu by accident) was born and raised in Kashmir, where I/we had to suffer sh%&, which pales in comparison to being called names by the iraq war opponents.
The public continues to express overwhelmingly favorable opinions of Jews (77% favorable) and Catholics (73%). About six-in-ten (57%) express positive opinions of evangelical Christians, about the same number who have a favorable view of Muslim-Americans.
By comparison, just 35% express favorable opinions of atheists; 50% have a negative opinion of atheists. These opinions have been quite stable in recent years.
cite. now, you have a point in regards to the statistics you cite, but you can’t make such a general assertion from one metric. in regards to the distribution of the hatred these data suggest that there is a wide but diffuse dislike for muslims, but a concentrated hatred toward jews. instead of making a blanket assertion, just cite your stats.
You seem upset because the statistical hot air you sail around on was let out of your sails by the FBI data. Crime against a group is probably a more telling piece of data as to how people feel about a religion than someone answering a question on a phone about their “feelings”.
I guess the problem for me is that this doesn’t ONLY happen when you have 6 people acting suspiciously on a plane. Other examples include:
A Canadian Doctor forbidden from flying because a drunk (almost certainly white) passenger saw him praying
Wearing a T-Shirt with Arabic script on it
Speaking in a foreign language at a restaurant
Where is the line for “suspicious behavior”? Does one completely hide every part of their identity? If a non-English speaking relative calls you in the airport, do you not answer? In the last link, there wasn’t even a plane involved — do you refrain from speaking your native tongue ANYWHERE in public?
And, as my experience on Spirit Air (I wrote about it above) shows, a lot of times you don’t even need to be a Muslim or be doing anything suspicious. This is just simple racism. So what do you do to avoid racism? You can’t exactly change the color of your skin.
Ward Churchill does not get invited to Democratic party events (Coulter made her infamous “show the liberals they can be killed” comments at a meeting of friggin GOPAC with Cheney present in the audience!). Exactly. Ann Coulter’s latest book is available for sale at my local HEB. That is how mainstream she is. Here is the book description of Ann Coulter’s latest “opus”, “The Church of Liberalism” :
Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion. In Godless, Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us its sacraments (abortion), its holy writ (Roe v. Wade), its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal), its clergy (public school teachers), its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free), its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the “absolute moral authority” of spokesmen from Cindy Sheehan to Max Cleland), and its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident).
Then, of course, there’s the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Funny, of course, but Ann Coulter has not even got started.
For liberals, evolution is the touchstone that separates the enlightened from the benighted. But Coulter neatly reverses the pretense that liberals are rationalists guided by the ideals of free inquiry and the scientific method. She exposes the essential truth about Darwinian evolution that liberals refuse to confront: it is bogus science.
Hilarious? Yes? No? A word of warning : what you are about to read is drop-dead funny. Be careful you don’t have your pizza go down the wrong way as you read it.
Writing with a keen appreciation for genuine science, Coulter reveals that the so-called gaps in the theory of evolution are all there is—Darwinism is nothing but a gap. After 150 years of dedicated searching into the fossil record, evolution’s proponents have failed utterly to substantiate its claims. And a long line of supposed evidence, from the infamous Piltdown Man to the “evolving” peppered moths of England, has been exposed as hoaxes. Still, liberals treat those who question evolution as religious heretics and prohibit students from hearing about real science when it contradicts Darwinism. And these are the people who say they want to keep faith out of the classroom?
You seem upset because the statistical hot air you sail around on was let out of your sails by the FBI data. Crime against a group is probably a more telling piece of data as to how people feel about a religion than someone answering a question on a phone about their “feelings”.
1) your data was interesting, i didn’t discount it
2) that’s your interpretation. like i said, you made a flat out assertion without offering background evidence. that’s pretty par for the course from you
3) and you didn’t normalize for the number of jews and muslims, or the reporting variance, etc. (there is a lot of dispute about how many muslims there are, muslim groups claim 3 X as many as most scholars)
4) you repeat dumb right-wing talking points a lot (e.g., “europeans don’t reproduce because they’re not religious”). it makes it hard to introduce a coherent counter-liberal perspective on this weblog a lot of the time. while we’re insulting each other i might as well be straight up about that fact
So maybe putting Ann Coulter dust jackets on books with possibly misinterpreted titles/subjects might be the way to go on planes…
The FBI defines a “hate crime” as:
Depends. A hate crime can be a physical assault, but it can also mean property crimes. If you look at the breakdown (2004 data), you’ll see that the most common types of hate crimes in the US are intimidation, vandalism, and “simple” assault. Doesn’t it make sense that a group which felt marginalized and disrespected by the police would underreport those kinds of crimes? Do you think police would respond to a vandalized mosque the same way they would to a vandalized Catholic church?
“I wonder what she thinks about 50 years of American foreign policy and the education in the US about other countries and culture.”
What do you think of the hundreds of thousands of educated (most with degrees from world calss institions subsidized by the few honest indian tax payers) Indians, who despite being aware of the “evil” American foreign policy has unleashed for the last fifty years, have been coming here since the mid sixties and contributing to the economic growth of this country? Growth that enables her to conduct wars,like Vietnam and Iraq. Growth that enabled America to overthrow legitimate regimes the world over, so that their interests might be furthered.
My miniscule number of posts makes it hard for you to “introduce a coherent counter-liberal perspective” ? Hilarious !! If your volumes of ramblings on everything under the sun in your posts over the past years has convinced no one, I doubt I am your problem.
My miniscule number of posts makes it hard for you to “introduce a coherent counter-liberal perspective” ? Hilarious !! If your volumes of ramblings on everything under the sun in your posts over the past years has convinced no one, I doubt I am your problem.
if you say something tendentious but easy to “refute” (e.g., there’s a pre-fab liberal response) the dominant center-left readership will simply focus on what you say. if you make an assertion without numbers no one will want to believe you if you disagree with the Zeitgeist. so if you post something in an early comment that is standard republican rhetoric/mantra as if this was powerlineblog a comment thread (yes, i know they don’t haev comments) it will devolve into standard left-right infighting, with the right always on the defensive because we’re WAY, WAY outnumbered. it then becomes an either with us or against fight, and so i feel discouraged to support your position when my reasoning is different because no one will listen.
anyway, that’s just how i see it.
Do you use “razib” or some other variation to post on conservative sites? How do they take it? (This is a serious question not an attempt at a dig)
Razib: Fair enough, I see your point. Though my experience has been that the tilt in the subjects selected that we post on is already loaded against anyone with a center/right view. Have you ever seen any subject posted on matters of politics/society/culture that wasn’t of a left view ? I doubt anything will really change that. Racist Republicans are evil, racist Democrats are “misundertood”. Take it from there.