Annie, put down your pen
It's all too easy nowadays to stir up feelings of ill will against Muslims. But Muslims (or people who look like Muslims) and airplanes -- well, you've got yourself a fear-mongering career!
Writer Annie Jacobsen has made a pretty good living doing precisely that since she penned an alarmist column for Women's Wall Street almost three years ago, in which she documented the purportedly suspicious behavior of 14 Syrian passengers on board Northwest Airlines flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles. Jacobsen's lengthy "Terror in the Skies" reads like a chapter from a Louis L'Amour novel, gripping readers with the harrowing tale of a woman enduring three hours at 30,000 feet of powerlessly watching would-be terrorists methodically taking turns building a bomb in the lavatory.
The column seems to make a compelling case for racial profiling; indeed, Jacobsen wrote in the first paragraph that the flight made her "question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from terrorist threats." She accuses the federal government of all but purposefully turning a blind eye in the name racial hypersensitivity to an air travel system practically begging for another terrorist attack. The problem is, Jacobsen's column is full of distortions, disputed claims and outright falsehoods about aviation security that could have been fact-checked by any marginally skeptical reporter. (I won't take the time to pick apart Jacobsen's original column, which has been thoroughly debunked here, here and here. The New York Times, which doesn't provide its older content online for free, also published at least one news article questioning Jacobsen's account.)
So why dredge up a years-old column that may have been a reaction not unlike others after 9/11? Am I just piling on a tired column for the sake of mean-spirited punditry? No -- it's Jacobsen who won't let her alarmism fade and humbly accept the fact that, like many passengers who fear flying, she simply overreacted. Since her July 2004 column, Jacobsen has written 27 (!) follow-up pieces under the banner "Terror in the Skies," her most recent installment posted online this week, April 18. I hope it's her last.
In her April 18 column, Jacobsen rightly points out the absurdity of a lawsuit by six Muslim imams who were kicked off a U.S. Airways flight in November after passengers expressed fear over the clerics' praying in the airport. The clerics have every right to sue US Airways, but their lawsuit goes too far by naming "John Doe" -- the actual passengers who complained to US Airways about the clerics.
But Jacobsen put the lawsuit in the larger context of what she insists is the government's botched reaction to (you guessed it) flight 327. In fact, Jacobsen has repeatedly insisted in her Womens Wall Street columns (and even a book) that those 14 Syrians on board her flight did indeed try to blow that Boeing 757 out of the sky, but dropped their plan just before touch-down in Los Angeles.
Like the evil terrorists they are, those Syrians (who turned out to be musicians in the U.S. on legitimate visas) later played at a concert at a hotel-resort in San Diego.
Reading Jacobsen's columns, it's easy to forget the most simple fact of her Terror in the Skies series -- nothing happened. Her plane landed safely, just as thousands of flights a day in the U.S. end without incident even though a random passenger may freak out occasionally. Most passengers, though, don't score book deals and pen alarmist columns that call for hardcore racial profiling after their ordeals, especially at a time when it's never been safer to fly on an airplane.
You rightly question Annie's tilting at imaginary terror windmills, but you fall into the same trap of not fact checking your assertions. The imams are suing passengers who claimed to be able to speak arabic and who claim to have overheard the Imams making anti-American and pro Saddam statements. The Imams claim no such statements were made. Let the courts decide whether the John Doe's were just pointing out potential terrorists or whether deliberate misinformation was provided to airline security that caused the hardships the Imams had to suffer. Let the facts come out in court.
Posted by: Nouman Farooqui | April 20, 2007 at 11:52 AM
You're at FL390: what are your immediate options?
If it walks like a duck and talks like at duck, its a duck.
Using their immediate options, passengers aboard American Airlines
flight from Paris over the Atlantic noticed Richard Reed walking like
and duck and talking like a duck; those American Airlines passengers
are alive, today.
(police, on arriving at a conflict, handcuff everyone until the
police can sort things out)
The farther from 9-11Americans get, the more opportunities
for revisionism.
The worst American is a hyphenated-American.
Get with the program; or go home!
Barbara Ann (pronounced with a John McCain accent)
Posted by: bg mendell | April 20, 2007 at 03:46 PM
Nice to know the mouth breathers are still out there, drooling and wetting themselves like babies every time they see someone the don't like.
I for one don't intend to walk around scared of my shadow.
And if I wanted to I could hyphenate myself about foruteen different times, but they all still end in american, so I'm not going anywhere.
Hmmmm - Mendell sounds kinda European to me. Maybe someone shouldn't be too quick to send everyone home.
Posted by: jose cabanillas | April 21, 2007 at 06:51 AM
Jose (can you see by the dawn's early light).....
yes, I too, am an hyphenated-American: American-Cherokee-Osage
with a pinch of Anglo-Saxon thrown in there somewhere. So, if I
were deported, it would mainly be to Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
And you?
And don't tell me that Americans stole this country from you; who did your
people massacre to lay claim? Plus, Mexico and America fought a war over
it (Mexico lost); or has that been revised in your folklore?
Posted by: bg mendell | April 21, 2007 at 09:46 AM
Wow, that was fast. The bigotry of the kook. Sometimes they are easy to smoke out.
FYI, my grandfather was from Puerto Rico, my mothers family from Germany and Switzerland (among others). Our bloodlines go back to the english colonies. Appearance wise, I took after my mothers family. I grew up in the south. So much for your "back to mexico" theory, you cheap racist doofus.
When I moved to California a whole bunch of years ago I started using my given name after years of only signing it on paper for the amusement factor of seeing peoples faces scrunch up when they met me for the first time. These days, I go by my given name and not the nickname that everyone back home knows me by because nimrods like bg mendell can more easily be smoked out. One constant in this debate is that when people see my name in a note or online these days they assume they know who and what I am.
You, sir or madam, are a blithering twit. Go off to your cave and create some more conspiracies to keep you afraid at night.
Posted by: jose cabanillas | April 25, 2007 at 07:01 AM
Hummm. Let's follow the bread crumbs, here.
G-E-R-M-A-N-Y? National Socialist?
Post World War II "migration" from G-E-R-M-A-N-Y to a Spanish-language
haven (country) in the Americas; changing sir names to suite the conditions.
"Migrating" to California to milk the welfare system.
Hummm.
Goldberg, Greenberg, Iceberg.
Posted by: bg mendell | April 25, 2007 at 12:48 PM
Annie Jacobsen now posts regularly at DailyCents.com.
Posted by: DC | May 07, 2007 at 03:39 PM