I left work later than I intended to tonight, and this concerned me because I’m in the middle of a rather difficult move from one apartment to another here in Chocolate City. Moving. Ugh, right? Anyway, while worrying that I now had even LESS time to sort and pack my crap, I overheard something important on NPR. “Maybe I was meant to run late”, I mused to myself…maybe, indeed.
What I ended up listening to had me riveted to the news [though it wasn’t quite a driveway moment— that would be challenging here in the city :)]. NPR’s All Things Considered co-host Robert Siegel was interviewing a Michigan-based attorney named Kurt Haskell; Haskell was aboard Northwest flight 253, along with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man who attempted to blow it up on Christmas day.
While all of you are aware of this horrifying incident, a few of you may be unaware of some disturbing additional information pertaining to that attack. On NPR, Haskell described a scene he witnessed with his wife prior to boarding that ill-fated flight home to Detroit. He recalled seeing terror suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab escorted to the gate by a “well-dressed Indian man”, who tried to intervene on Abdulmutallab’s behalf and browbeat an airline employee in to overlooking the fact that the wanna-be martyr lacked a passport. WTF? Who gets to board anything without a passport, these days? And also, uh, INDIAN? I think he meant South Asian, because if Mr. Haskell is anything like me, he was born here and probably can’t tell the difference between a Pakistani and a Sri Lankan from a mere glance.
Let me perfectly clear: I did not come out of semi-hiding to write this post for the purpose of moaning that now “we” look “bad”, nor am I digging in my heels and protesting this “slur” against all good Yindians from Yindia. Aside: I think this incident illustrates a point I have long-made on this blog and it illustrates it very well; nuance and difference are lost on most people. While many of my first and a few of my second generation friends hotly protest being lumped in with “those” Pakistanis or “those” Indians (depending on whether they are the former or latter, mais oui), I roll my eyes for many reasons, including the fact that racists and other assholes just see curry. Brown. Apu. Outsourcing. Perhaps now, Jay Sean.
They sure as hell don’t assume that I’m a Christian or know where Kerala is– to most of the people with whom I interact, I’m Brown, most probably Hindu, and possibly on my way to an Arranged Marriage which I can then write about in poor chick-lit form, via a book with any combination of henna, mangoes, sari pallus and whatever else, flanked by an ersatz Indic font on the cover. Yay for predictable fiction! /aside
So why DID I write this post? Because.
a) Apparently everyone/everything really IS connected to someone Brown these days (!)
b) Haskell was so sure that the man ushering Abdulmutallab was Indian that he said as much a few times during the interview which I overheard, and NOT ONCE was he asked about this detail…not even via a tentative, “Well, you think the man was Indian, correct?”
c) Almost every article I’ve read since, including a post on ATC’s own blog omits this potent adjective. See for yourself:
As we reported earlier, Haskell (a Michigan lawyer) has been telling investigators and the news media about a conversation he says he heard before passengers boarded Northwest flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day.
According to Haskell, Abdulmutallab and an older, well-dressed man approached an airline employee. The older man said Abdulmutallab was Sudanese, had no passport, but needed to get on the flight. The airline employee directed them to a manager and the men went down a hallway. Haskell says he never saw the older man again, and didn’t see Abdulmutallab until the incident aboard the flight as it approached Detroit — when the Nigerian (the suspect is not Sudanese) allegedly tried to ignite some typeof explosive. [npr]
Interesting, right?
I haven’t found anything else which mentions the “Indian” mystery man who helped put an evil criminal on Flight 253, but whatever his ethnic origin, if he was aware of what he was participating in then I wish him a similarly painful, scorched-balls-sort of fate, and I fervently hope that he, too, fails at harming innocent people.
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Because I am in the middle of moving during a holiday week, I hope you will take extra pains to be civil to each other in the comment thread below. I do not have internet access in my new home (yet) and even if I did, I do not have the time to wade through comment-drama. I want to thank you in advance for your sure-to-be thoughtful words; I hope I am not given a reason (or fifty) to regret posting this. 🙂
LOL!!!!!!!!!!
Total Desi uncle move. I can just picture it!
Complete with the head nod thingy – i love it!
Do other South Asians do that as well? If not, then yeah, the uncle was Indian. Perhaps that was the dead give away.
Mais oui–isn’t this the problem? The English-language term “Greek” refers to a nationality, an ethnicity, and a language–obviously, Indian doesn’t refer to a language, but it does refer to a nationality. Does it also refer to an ethnicity? Your point, I take it, is that “South Asian” is the better term for–what–surely not a language nor a nationality? An ethnicity, then? Or just a geographic region? But what, then, the set of ethnicities that have been found there in the past 1000 years? I am perplexed. At any rate, the Detroit bombing attempt once again highlights that the problem is not an ethnicity, but an ideology.
My point/thought process was actually more like…
“WTF, did that guy just say some INDIAN MAN helped a suspected terrorist get on a plane?”
“Wait…how did he know he was INDIAN? He could’ve been Bangladeshi. Eh, it’s not like most Amreekans can or care to tell the difference.”
“Still, that’s sloppy. And weird. What’s weirder is that the host is letting him say it over and over without attempting to delve deeper or clarify…”
“Whatever, mang…I wonder who this ‘well-dressed’ guy is…this is mad shady. DUDE! I should post this on SM!”
“That is the stupidest idea, ever. Everyone will pounce on the ‘South Asian’-thing and it will be a commenting-clusterfuck, one which I can’t even moderate since Comcast sucks about keeping their word.”
“Oooh, but if I do post, it’s an excuse to use my xmas gift!” 🙂
So yeah, the post was meant to focus on the (unreported?) fact that a Desi person may have enabled some asshole to almost blow up a plane, but I can see how it may go elsewhere. We’ve done the “South Asian vs. Indian” death-match posts SEVERAL times before…and years ago, to boot. I promise I didn’t want to go there [but I’m out of practice wrt blogging, so I did. :(] Thanks for giving me this attempt to clarify my intentions, though.
I happened to chance upon another interview with Kurt Haskell this morning which went in a similar vein – not only did this mention of the “Indian” man puzzle me as it did you, ANNA, but the whole interview that I heard just made me feel a bit sick about the view of certain groups held by certain Americans. Although, to Haskell’s credit, he stated that he didn’t think “terrorist” when he saw these two together.
Seriously – I can understand this in perhaps a domestic context, but obviously a passport is most needed in an international travel situation – except for e.g. higher-level dignitaries, are there legal exceptions to flying internationally without a passport? When asked whether he felt US officials should be thanked for averting this crisis, Haskell said it was only out of sheer luck that Abdulmutallab did not succeed.
I predict this turns out to be a bunch of garbage with no connection at all to what happened.
The illogical overreaction of our government has been very sad. The government’s job is to prevent terrorists from getting on board in the first place. It is not to punish the vast majority of innocent passengers who are already on board with stupid rules that are nothing more than security theater. The fact that I can no longer read a book within the hour before landing means that even an incompetent terrorist who can’t even explode an underwear bomb has totally succeeded in what he set out to do.
Anna, I see your point, and I don’t mean to distract. Just wanted to suggest that Haskell’s comment wasn’t necessarily so crazy as to have meant the guy was of Indian nationality. If it was instead meant as “ethnically” Indian, it’s not “so” crazy. “South Asian” is at best a modest improvement, given the diversity of ethnic groups in the area.
Yep, if I can’t pee before landing, the terrorists have won! Of course, they only have said you can’t use the bathroom–maybe if I see it, I’ll spray it. . . .
He could have been a Yemin national or even Egyptian. Many people could pass for Indian.
Wow, I can’t believe they let him on a flight to the US without a passport. WHAT THE F—-?
I believe the correct term is Native American.
It is amazing that yet another engineer who has an explosion in his pants on seeing the stewardesses is still news.
nice phrase. what i find ridiculous about the post 9-11 escalating “security” measures is that each successful or even attempted attack gives the security officials something new to focus upon, even though odds are that most terrorists would not think to repeat such an element again, esp. if it is being widely scrutinised. i also don’t see what the point is of restricting movement in the last our since, having passed through security without a problem, a terrorist could have used the hours prior to the last one to carry out the plan. at this rate, we’ll soon have a personal seat handcuff in addition to entertainment systems. which is all well and good, but considering they let him pass without a passport and with a bomb, it all seems rather pointless. except, of course, to tell us how many unpublicised attacks have been averted.
arguably, i can see how “indian” popped to mind for lack of a better term, so maybe the issue, then, is not only knowing the difference between south asian nationalities, but not even knowing enough to use the term “south asian” to encompass all those originating from the region.
This is what we get for not responding to an email from a needy woman asking for help in transferring her untold millions to the US to escape the clutches of the tyrannical dictators who hold her in their country. And all she wanted was our bank account and wire transfer details.
9 · Saheli on December 29, 2009 12:47 AM · Direct link
Wow, I can’t believe they let him on a flight to the US without a passport. WHAT THE F—-?
Personally this bit of information makes me highly dubious…. I mean, anyone else who has flown a lot internationally like me (which I bet is a lot of you) would know that you can’t just go traveling around without a passport. There is more than one person who is going to check you for a passport before you get on the plane anyways. Even if it got past one person, someone else would be checking for it.
Well, I am biased by my age and education, but calling this an “issue” is to privilege the past few years of North American academic jargon over the world’s hundreds of millions of English-language speakers who are not familiar with the term “South Asian.” In fact, in my schoolboy days (and English is my second language) “Middle East” referred to Central and Southern Asia, that’s why “Near East” was used to mean the Levant, and “Far East” what is now known as East Asia. So let’s not get too dug in over the one allegedly timelessly correct term, that’s just a bit shallow and provincial. Unless you’re an ideologue, in which case I apologize.
I wouldn’t be so sure about the entertainment systems.
Apparently, “they” see something, you say something.
euro wrote:
You don’t seem to grasp the significance of what you have yourself written. While all categories and adjectives get a little fuzzy at their edges, the term ‘Indian’ when used as an ethnic identifier is fuzzy even at its core, given, as you note, the ‘diversity of ethnic groups in the area’.
In addition to the internal diversity, there are lots of Sudanese, Ethiopians, Arabs, even some Greeks, not to speak of Burmese, Thais or Chinese – who look like ‘Indians’ (and vice-versa). Therefore the only use of the term that can be precise, in the context of describing someone – is nationality. And therefore you don’t even suggest someone is ‘Indian’ unless you’ve checked his passport.
non-euro, that’s just silly–there is no reason to be so dogmatic that “Indian” means nationality, as opposed to ethnicity–as I said, consider “Greek” or “Spanish.”
Gosh, we are everywhere. And we do look a lot like a whole bunch of people. At yesterday’s showing of (the non-Vaishnavist) “Avatar,” my nine-year-old asked me if the scientist called “Max” were Indian.
Is he?
I whispered back that he could be generic Tamizh/Malayalee/Bengali and equally Egyptian/Lebanese/Ethiopian/African American.
My point being I suck at identifying people by their appearance alone, and that probably plenty of other people do as well, because our phenotypes are pretty mixed/identical. And apropos of nothing, I’m going to add that I wouldn’t mind having blue skin and love to be able to move like the Na’avi. Also, was their blue skin a nod to the ur-avatars of Rama and Krishna?
It’s becoming clear you don’t have a leg to stand on, argument-wise. This is not about being ‘dogmatic’, it’s about being precise, arguing logically, and about not using terms signifying national origin as ethnic descriptors.
I don’t need to put up with an all-purpose stand-in term like ‘Indian’ with a history of being an old colonialist and racist shorthand – as an ethnic identifier – just because other people are lazy, or feel like being lexically imprecise, because that has no consequence to them.
Here is another account by a different person who also saw an indian guy in a suit (well-dressed?) being handcuffed and taken away by cops after the plane had landed in Detroit. Same guy?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
We stayed in the baggage claim area for 3 hours without any word of what happened next. We were only allowed into the bathroom one person at a time by an officer who guarded the door. Behind the line of our immediate security detail there were hundreds of other police officers moving around back and forth, as if they were on they were on the night watch guarding a military base from a potential threat. What they were doing was unclear. The only thing that I recall happening is seeing an Indian guy off to the side, an older gentleman wearing a gray suit leaning against the wall. Suddenly there was a police officer next to him pulling his arms back and pulling handcuffs on him. The man didn’t struggle, the bags which seemed to be his were left there, and he and the police officer disappeared around the corner.
There does appear to be a desi connection. Here is another account by a different person who also saw an indian guy in a suit (well-dressed?) being handcuffed and taken away by cops after the plane had landed in Detroit. Same guy?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
We stayed in the baggage claim area for 3 hours without any word of what happened next. We were only allowed into the bathroom one person at a time by an officer who guarded the door. Behind the line of our immediate security detail there were hundreds of other police officers moving around back and forth, as if they were on they were on the night watch guarding a military base from a potential threat. What they were doing was unclear. The only thing that I recall happening is seeing an Indian guy off to the side, an older gentleman wearing a gray suit leaning against the wall. Suddenly there was a police officer next to him pulling his arms back and pulling handcuffs on him. The man didn’t struggle, the bags which seemed to be his were left there, and he and the police officer disappeared around the corner.
Well, there does appear to be a desi connection. Here is another account by a different person who also saw an indian guy in a suit (well-dressed?) being handcuffed and taken away by cops after the plane had landed in Detroit. Same guy?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
We stayed in the baggage claim area for 3 hours without any word of what happened next. We were only allowed into the bathroom one person at a time by an officer who guarded the door. Behind the line of our immediate security detail there were hundreds of other police officers moving around back and forth, as if they were on they were on the night watch guarding a military base from a potential threat. What they were doing was unclear. The only thing that I recall happening is seeing an Indian guy off to the side, an older gentleman wearing a gray suit leaning against the wall. Suddenly there was a police officer next to him pulling his arms back and pulling handcuffs on him. The man didn’t struggle, the bags which seemed to be his were left there, and he and the police officer disappeared around the corner.
Hmmm, unfortunately there does appear to be a desi connection. Here is another account by a different person who also saw an indian guy in a suit (well-dressed?) being handcuffed and taken away by cops after the plane had landed in Detroit. Same guy?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
We stayed in the baggage claim area for 3 hours without any word of what happened next. We were only allowed into the bathroom one person at a time by an officer who guarded the door. Behind the line of our immediate security detail there were hundreds of other police officers moving around back and forth, as if they were on they were on the night watch guarding a military base from a potential threat. What they were doing was unclear. The only thing that I recall happening is seeing an Indian guy off to the side, an older gentleman wearing a gray suit leaning against the wall. Suddenly there was a police officer next to him pulling his arms back and pulling handcuffs on him. The man didn’t struggle, the bags which seemed to be his were left there, and he and the police officer disappeared around the corner.
Just wanted to say I am glad you are back blogging, Anna. I’ve missed your posts and hope you are doing well. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and all that…
Wow – thanks Anna. I totally missed this part of it.
Anna, here’s the same story from the NY Post:
I live in Michigan, and was watching the local news yesterday when I heard this story. The one thing that I noticed about this was that Haskell consistently nationality/race to distinguish and identify the two men. He always referred to the two as “The Indian Man” and “The Black Man”, even though by the time of the broadcast, the name of the terrorist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was very well known. Haskell could have used many descriptors, especially for Abdulmutallab, such as “The Terrorist” and if he has believed the “Indian” man, Haskell could have also used “The Sudanese Man”. As for the “Indian” man, he could have said “The Well Dressed Man” or, as we all agree “The South Asian Man”. Regardless of what Haskell could have said, I found that the way he put it was very narrow-minded, especially in that he used only the nationality/race to separate the two men.
You can’t just suddenly fiat that Greek, Indian, English, or Spanish mean only national identity, and not also ethnicity (and, in the case of three of the four, language). English doesn’t work by your fiat.
You can’t just suddenly fiat that Greek, Indian, English, or Spanish mean only national identity, and not also ethnicity (and, in the case of three of the four, language). English doesn’t work by your fiat.
he can’t be indian. doctors and engineers don’t dress that well
Help. I help everybody. Wrong place, wrong time, if the story is right. My nanaji dresses in 3 piece everyday,helps everybody. Big reaction over something that has happened many times before.
People here think Pakistan/Afghanistan/Iraq all look the same (and they say a as in cat, not a as in car). India is the snappy dresser.
I mean if I was in shock I would say chinese for asian. african american for all black people. Mexican for all Spanish/Portuguese speaking people. White for a person who could be from america/canada/ uk/france/ germany…. not italy though, I’d know an italian 🙂
Granted shock wears off after a while, but the person might be afraid of being called untrustwrthy if he switched his statement now.
OK, so what if the guy really turns out to be Indian?
Will Haskell get kudos for being on point?
I usually dont LOL, but I did LOL after reading this. Welcome back Anna! BTW, I don’t mind the Jay Sean Stereotype..I am all for it 🙂
“OK, so what if the guy really turns out to be Indian?”
If the man was Indian, it’s highly unlikely that his motive was terrorism. Unless the Indian is an Islamic radical or terrorist. More likely, a Pakistani facilitating terror. The use of the term “Indian” was rash and irresponsible. Haskell should have qualified his statement. But that is probably asking too much of a huge section of the American public. This is 2009 going on 2010, and there still far too many Americans who are ignorant, and who cannot differentiate between one group of people and another. Nor qualify their observations by saying something like “The individual looked Indian ethnically, however he could easily be from Pakistan, from where many terrorists emerge”.
Pocobrat- The character Max actually is Indian. The character’s full name is Max Patel and he’s played by Dileep Rao.
The bad guy here is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, not Kurt Haskell.
Which country and culture in the world contains common folk who can successfully differentiate between one group of people and another?
Even if they can’t differentiate between two groups of similar looking people( Indian Punjabis vs Pakistani Punjabis for example), they can at least make a qualifying statement. By now, it should be well known that Pakistan is the biggest terrorist state and source of terrorists on the planet. So the chances of a terrorist supporter or facilitator being Pakistani as opposed to Indian, is very high. Remember that Haskell is no rustic bumpkin; he’s a lawyer and an educated person.
This story sounds rather strange, the last liquid bomb story is even stranger.
Thanks for this post Anna – I had the same “wtf” reaction to the mention of an “Indian” man going unquestioned by the interviewer. Yeah, it is possible the man was Indian – but for Kurt Haskell to make that assumption and for the interviewer to not question/correct it even once really irks me. I saw an ABC interview that went along the same lines – where the other person’s claimed identity went unquestioned.
A rather naive question: can the contributors to Sepia Mutiny contact NPR and/or ABC about this? I suppose if such questions don’t get asked, the larger media will not care to correct their reports.
Ok, so here’s the thing…
What throws me off with the emphasis on new security enhancements is that it obscures the real idiocy that occurred-Someone w/o a passport and on the terrorist watchlist who was ratted out by his own father, was allowed to board an aircraft. And not in some ramshackle third world airport in the middle of the desert but in Amsterdam!
But instead of faulting the government for not doing its job, the media is entertaining the concept of profiling again…
“If the man was Indian, it’s highly unlikely that his motive was terrorism. Unless the Indian is an Islamic radical or terrorist. More likely, a Pakistani facilitating terror. The use of the term “Indian” was rash and irresponsible.”
Wait– what? Indians can’t be terrorists? Does that mean white guys can’t be terrorists either. It is only those crazy Muselmans, right?
How is using term “Indian” irresponsible. This is an eyewitness trying to best describe what he saw. We all know that eye-witnesses are not very reliable. If I am being mugged and I say I am thinking it was a black man because I caught a glimpse but I was not sure, is that being irresponsible too? Or maybe even if I am saying it was a man and not a woman. I mean, I did not go looking down his shirt.
I think many are over-reacting to this. The man is obviously trying to state what he say as eye-witness. I’m sure he is not out to finger the whole Indian people and also I am sure that an Indian is just as capable of being terrorist or criminal as any other person in the world.
wtf is up with the censoring?
An indian guy (or a guy who looks like the stereotypical indian) was arrested after the plane landed in Detroit. This according to a report by a Huffington Post blogger who was on the plane:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/roey-rosenblith/over-detroit-skies_b_404255.html
Apparently the indian arrested in Detroit was different from the one in Amsterdam:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2009/12/28/2009-12-28_did_he_board_without_a_passport.html
“Kurt and Lori Haskell, both bankruptcy lawyers, told the Daily News they saw a sharply dressed Indian man in his 50s – who did not get on the flight – trying to talk an Amsterdam gate agent into letting the suspect board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 without his passport……
The Haskells, who were returning to Newport, Mich., from a safari in Uganda, said the passengers were held in the Detroit airport for six hours. While waiting, they say, they saw a different Indian man taken away in handcuffs after a bomb-sniffing dog was” alerted to his carry-on bag.
Maya, please desist from abusing the moth eaten fig leaf of McVeigh.We have discussed this countless times on this site.A random deranged anarchist is different from an ideologically driven movement for global religious domination. To deny it or equate the two is sheer hypocrisy. As an Indian, being hatefully labeled a ‘Paki’ is not an uncommon occurrence for me. And I have to share in the popularity of my trans-border cousins in many ways, much against my will, more so since the 7/7 bombings. Sad, because our overlapping culture makes it easier to connect at an individual level. To call a brown person ‘Indian’ is a racial thing. However, with changing socio-political realties, the western world needs to assume a much more nuanced approach when dealing with brown people. There have been NO terrorist attacks against western nations hatched in India. Indians generally view the US favourably, compared to, say, Pakistan. It is similar to a white lout pissing on Latvia’s freedom monument, and being labeled an American, even though statistically and culturally it is almost certainly a Brit.
“Wait– what? Indians can’t be terrorists? Does that mean white guys can’t be terrorists either. It is only those crazy Muselmans, right?”
Let’s not get too theoretical here. We are talking about an environment in which airplanes are threatened with being blown up. Al Qaeda, the Taliban and various other Islamic radical/terrorist groups are far and away the major suspects. Pakistan is the principal source or supporter of these terrorists, as any Indians( in fact, anyone period) should know by now.
This is not a time to start getting abstract about the possibility of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad being a suspect in the attempted bombing. What would the motive be, the goal? Yes, I’m sure the VHP can dig up some grievance against the US too. But blowing up an airplane? No.
Plenty of people can’t tell the difference among South Asia, Middle Eastern, and sometimes even Latin American peoples. We brown people kinda look the same to certain folk.
I am more mad at the fact that a Indian guy was put in handcuffs just because he was brown. That could have been any one of you, except for the Indians with a yogurt like skin color, you guys are all clear.
Indians are always screwed when it comes to dogs. The smell of spice can be detected by the human nose, let alone one that could smell a Patel Bros. that is 3 miles away.
Maya, Please stop with the McVeigh thing. It has been discussed several times before. A random anarchist is very different from organised ideological warfare aimed at global religious domination. To equate the two is sheer hypocrisy. It is a very tattered fig leaf. As an Indian, being hatefully called a ‘Paki’ is a not a very uncommon occurrence. We share in the popularity of our cousins worldwide much against our will. After 7/7 and many other similar plots, traveling has become such a pleasure for brown people. There have been NO terrorist plots hatched in India against western targets. Popularity ratings of the US remain very high in India, compared to, say, Pakistan. In this changed geo-political climate, western nations need to take a more nuanced view of ‘brown’ countries and people, and educate their citizens likewise. This is analogous to a white lout pissing on the freedom monument in Riga, and being automatically labeled an American, even though statistically and culturally, he is most likely a Brit.