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Come fly with me

3 min read

You’ve probably heard the joke, which surfaced mere days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Did you hear a flight attendant took away a little old lady’s knitting needles in New York?”

“No! Why’d they do that?”

“She said she was knitting an Afghan.”

Here’s another one just heard:

“Did you hear a flight attendant refused to give an unopened can of soda to a woman on a plane to Washington?”

“No! Why’d they do that?”

“They said she might use it to make a weapon.”

As the saying goes, this would be funny if only it weren’t true.

Tahera Ahmad, a Muslim, was flying May 29 aboard Shuttle America, which feeds United Airlines, from Chicago to Washington to participate in a conference promoting dialogue between Palestinian and Israeli youths.

When offered an already open can of Diet Coke by the flight attendant, Ahmad asked if she might have an unopened can, for hygienic reasons.

The flight attendant refused, then gave an unopened can of beer to a man sitting nearby.

When Ahmad asked the attendant why she couldn’t have an unopened can, the flight attendant said, “We are unauthorized to give unopened cans to people because they may use it as a weapon on the plane.”

If you’re still scratching your head over the logic behind the refusal, maybe it’s because I left out a crucial fact: Ahmad was wearing a headscarf, also called a hijab, which apparently made her a potential terrorist. And not just in the eyes of a flight attendant.

After she asked nearby passengers if they witnessed the discriminatory incident, a man sitting across the aisle from her said, according to Ahmad, “You Moslem [sic], you need to shut the F up.”

What makes the incident even more troubling is it took place just days before ABC News revealed Transportation Security Administration agents were unable to detect mock explosives or banned weapons smuggled through airport checkpoints by Homeland Security teams posing as passengers. Agents failed 95 percent of the time, ABC reported.

Clearly, the unnamed Shuttle America flight attendant, who United said “will no longer serve United customers,” has a bright future at TSA.

Both the plane’s pilot and the attendant later apologized to Ahmad. United spokesman Charles Hobart told CNN the whole thing arose from a “misunderstanding.”

He didn’t elaborate on what exactly was misunderstood.

You’ve got to wonder at the kind of skewed logic that makes any woman wearing a headscarf or any man with a beard into a terrorist.

It’s rather like this flawed theorem, which circulated in the early 1970s:

God is love.

Love is blind.

Ray Charles is blind.

Ray Charles is God.

Using this approach, I must report I grew up in a household that harbored not one but two female terrorists – my mother and my sister, who also wore headscarves – and that Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren and just about any female film star of the 1950s must also have been planning to blow up the Hollywood sign, although they would have been forced to use the much less effective 6-oz. glass bottle of Coke.

It makes me wonder if I should report any evangelical Christians sitting next to me on a flight because they might use the pointy snouts of their fish pins to slit my throat.

I fly Air Xenophobia.

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