$240,000 Airline Settlement over Banning Arabic Script
Raed Jarrar received a $240,000 settlement from JetBlu and TSA over an incident in which he was not allowed to fly wearing a t-shirt with an Arabic phrase on it. For those who followed Iraq blogs, you might remember the Salam Pax site that asked "where's Raed." Well here he is.
Raed's t-shirt said "lan nasmut," "we will not be silent," a slogan adopted by Arab opponents of totalitarian regimes from the White Rose group that opposed the Nazis. My recollection is that he was told at the time he should have known better than to wear Arabic while flying.
I wrote an essay at the time about what I see as the significance of such marking of difference by the American Right.
His blog is Raed in the Middle.
Gee, I think I have an Arabic t-shirt somewhere . . .
/End
posted by Juan Cole @ 1/06/2009 03:03:00 PM
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5 Comments:
And if he wore that lovely shirt with Bush's face on it under the caption: Worlds Most Dangerous Terrorist? Hey! At least it's in English!
>>Gee, I think I have an Arabic t-shirt somewhere ...
Sorry, Juan, no quarter-mil for you. You would never be taken for a person from the Middle East even if you started speaking Arabic loudly. Nice try.
I am friendly with one of the artists who produced these t-shirts. To help Raed in his lawsuit, she and another woman wore that exact t-shirt (it is available in several languages besides Arabic and English - including Farsi, Hebrew, German, etc.) and boarded a JetBlue plane without incident. Twice.
Can you say "ethnic profiling"?
Peace.
I think T-shirts should also carry the slogans of various universities, such as "Roll Tide" or "How 'bout them dogs" if only the appropriate translations were available. ("How 'bout them dogs" might be problematic so, perhaps, "How 'bout them squat yet noble mascots.")
If a university objects, offer them a portion of the profits for their cultural diversity fund.
If they don't have a cultural diversity fund, offer to start one.
For general public use, might I also suggest "Can you say ethnic profiling" or perhaps, "I don't know, it's all Greek to me."
That last one was an example of dry wit. Imagine this scenario.
Officer: Son, what does that say?
Otherwise law abiding youth: I don't know, it's all Greek to me.
(Some time interval later)
a Judge says: We hereby award the Plaintiff $275,000 dollars in emotional suffering and for ...
I totally agree with Mary Fox. As a Moslem (formerly irish Catholic ) all I can say is that my tears are not dry for a week. I donated blood for Palestine but UPS refused to deliver it to ANY Palestinian hospital. I refuse to believe there is no way to deliver my donation to Palestine. What a shame.
Years ago, a friend of mine, who works on Islamic mysticism was once on a flight from the East to the West coast of the U.S. He sat next to an elderly Jewish family from New York. He helped them adjust their trays, but later, when he began writing notes for himself on the margins of a book on ibn Arabi, the man purposely spilled his coffee on my friend's clothes. The airline hostess saw the incident and looked at my friend in shock. My friend was afraid to even complain because he was a Muslim and an international student on a flight. Sad.
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