You Can Judge a Quran by Its Cover

History is full of examples of discrimination and over reactions. Today, being a Muslim on and airplane might just get you nowhere. Last week in my hometown of Minneapolis, a group of imams was asked to get off a flight because of “suspicious behavior” before and during boarding. I believe this was a case of paranoia and ignorance at its ugly best.

The facts are still somewhat sketchy, but here is what the passengers and some officials are saying.

1) The imams prayed before getting on the plane.
2) The imams shouted, “Allah, Allah!” before boarding.
3) The imams asked for seat belt extensions after boarding.

Wow! I am surprised they were not sent to Gitmo on the next CIA flight out!

I cannot be the only one who sees how ugly this is. Let me address these points one by one in an attempt to illustrate just how ridiculous this whole thing is.

1) The imams prayed before getting on the plane.
Muslims are required to pray 5 times per day. These prayer must be carried out in such a way that it would not be possible to hide the fact they are praying. So the contention that they “could have been more discreet” about it is crap. Americans pride themselves on their freedoms. Our nation was partially founded by people who were escaping religious persecution for Christ sake! Oh how hypocritical we have become as a people. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are surely rolling in their graves.

2) The imams shouted, “Allah, Allah!” before boarding.
Again I will hit the religious freedom chord. Also, I do not believe for one second that any real terrorist would be calling such attention to himself while preparing to commit a suicide bombing. Come one people! Get a fuckin’ grip!

3) The imams asked for seat belt extensions after boarding.
This is one thing I do not pretend to understand or have an answer to, but I can say I find it pretty harmless. Now if they had asked for extra sharp plastic knives or maybe some electric wiring…

I understand that this whole scene may have been disconcerting for the white-bread Midwesterners who were getting on the plane. And I also think that a part of the reason the imams did this was to see how far they could go. Maybe the whole thing was just a publicity stunt – that is a distinct possibility. But regardless of what they said or did they had just as much right to be on that plane as the paranoid non-Muslims did, and the imams were deprived of that right.

I guess the whole thing boils down to this…

If this had been a group of Christian missionaries singing and praying before getting on the plane… If they had shouted, “Jesus, Jesus!”… If these same Christians had asked for seat belt extensions for no apparent reason… Well, it is pretty obvious to me that we would never have even heard of this whole event.

So if Christians and Jews can do it; if Buddhists and Taoists could do it; if Pagans (well maybe not Pagans, we hate them too) – why can’t Muslims? Because some of their brethren are blowing themselves up. So we lump them all together into one group. It is as simple as that.

History repeats itself. 65 years ago, America lumped all the Japanese into one group and it meant a loss of freedom for thousands of people all over the U.S. (Side note for future topic: We did NOT put Germans into camps – only Japanese people.)

It appears that our paranoia is rearing its ugly head again and it’s focused squarely on the Muslims. No check that – people who look and act like Muslims. Come on you imams out there, tone it down! Shave those beards. Wear our clothes. Speak more English. Be less yourselves and more like us. We will like you better and let you ride on our planes.

I would bet anything that the passengers of the Mayflower heard the same rhetoric from Europeans in the early 17th century. I am glad the pilgrims of those colonial years did what was right and stood up for themselves. I am sad that their ancestors seem to be so ignorant of their own past.

And the oppressed shall become the oppressors.

Post-Election Hangover

Sorry to be so absent.

The elections in both Brazil and the U.S. captured so much of my attention over the past months that I needed a break from my brain.

Now I am back. And with a tasty treat coming up in a few minutes.

To Have One's Cake and Eat It Too

I like movies. There is one called, “Get Shorty” with John Travolta that is particularly good. In one scene, Travolta is set up by the local crime lord. He is given a key to an airport locker that has $500k in it and told to retrieve it. But before Travolta opens the locker he notices DEA all over the place and decides not to open the locker at all. On his way out of the airport he is accosted by the crime lord’s thug and told to give the key back since he did not open the locker. Travolta can’t believe his ears. The trick did not work and now they want him to give the key back?! “I don’t know how you guys are not all dead!” Travolta says incredulously.

Now we see a similar situation with the Bush administration regarding CIA interrogation and suspected terrorists (see link).

The story is incredible to me. Let’s say the CIA is interrogating an innocent man. After waterboarding him, using sleep deprivation, and basically leaving him a psychological mess, the Bush admin and the CIA do not want him to reveal their interrogation tactic to anyone. Imagine it! You are innocent. You are interrogated over a period of months – maybe years. After all that, instead of getting an apology, you are given an NDA to sign so that you don’t tell anyone what was done to you. Fuckin’ unbelievable!

The argument the Justice department is using is that disclosure of questioning techniques would better prepare terrorists for when they are captured and thereby cost American lives. Hah!

How the hell does the Justice Dept. plan to keep these former prisoners from talking? Are they going to follow them forever, tap their phones, infiltrate their circle of friends? I mean really!

If the Bush admin persists in violating of human rights when interrogating suspects through torture, the least they could do is accept when they made a mistake and let the guy go. By trying to make the former prisoner also stay silent about what happened to him in prison, this administration is stepping over the line of logic.

It is pragmatically impossible to make sure NONE of these people talk. It would be simply stupid to expect anything of the kind. But it is typical of this administration.

We should expect more crap before long from the endless stream of shit that flows from the production line of the Bush gang. I for one am not looking forward to two more years of this.

The Land of the Touchy

After moving to Brazil, I noticed many differences in culture and habits from what I was accustomed to in the U.S. One of the things that really pleased me about my new land was how the Brazilians did not have this nutty obsession with political correctness that has held America in its grip for over a decade now.

Don’t get me wrong. Some degree of political correctness is simply good manners. After all, I feel more comfortable using the word, “Chinese,” than, “Chink,” and I am pretty sure that most Chinese people would prefer the former to the latter. However, not being able to use the word, “Oriental,” seems a bit much to me, and I think that is a case where things get taken too far.

Another such case recently popped up on the Web (see link), and though it did not surprise me, it did disappoint me.

The story is about a police chief in Florida who, using a memo, chastised his entire 80-person staff to lose weight and get fit. Because he used the term, “Jelly Belly” in the title of his memo, it caused a furor and the chief was fired. Fired! For having the guts to call out his whole police force (Gee, d’ya think it is possible that they are overweight?) to be in good physical condition he was canned just because he used the term, “jelly belly.” Jesus H. Christ, someone needs to get a reality check.

I remember I once was in a seminar that dealt with sales and management problems back in the U.S. During the second day, we were finishing up an activity where we had broken down into sub-groups of 10 people to work out some ideas to solve a given problem. After all the groups had finished, the group leaders stood up one by one to summarize what his or her group had discussed. The group next to ours had a leader who was a man in his early 50’s. He stood and started to recount who had given certain ideas within his group. Then he said, referring to a woman in a red dress who was in her early 30’s, “This girl here had an idea to…” As the seminar leader moved on to the next group leader, he was interrupted by the, woman in the red dress, who stood up. She was crying and said that she had been offended by the word, “girl,” that the older man had used. The older man apologized, but the woman later asked to be reassigned to a different group.

What the fuck is wrong with people? Have we lost our collective sense of humor, or worse, our sense of reason?

If a boss asks his staff to shape up and asks them if they have “jelly bellies” it may not be politically correct, but he may only trying to make the subject lighter. If someone calls a woman a girl, that may not be appropriate, but that does not mean it came of bad intentions.

Maybe it is time America as a whole started to pay more attention to things that make a real difference in society instead of dwelling so much on semantics. Of course, I am not saying we should all just kick back and start letting people call us bad names and disrespect each other. I am simply suggesting that the pendulum of good manners has swung a bit too far to one side and it is time to relax and really communicate with each other.

Take a lude and enjoy the ride, people.