A Hasidic Jew was removed from Canadian airliner ACJ last week for simply praying. While taxing, Rabbi Ronny Fine quietly began praying to himself while lurching back and forth. A flight attendant told the Rabbi that his praying was making others nervous and that he had to leave! What’s even more amusing is this quote from a passenger…
The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn’t a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave.
Now what the hell is going on here? First there was the story about a man not being allowed to board a plane because he had a t-shirt with the words, "We will not be silent" in both English and Arabic, now this?!?
Honestly this mass hysteria and lack of common sense is going to tear us apart. As far as I’m concerned, this is worse than the terrorist attacks themselves. They have succeeded at creating a society laden with fear and have robbed us of our basic freedoms and decency. The World Trade Center will be rebuilt long before our common sense has returned and our freedoms restored.
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the airline industry has gone completely bonkers, i wont fly anywhere no matter what the circumstances and i wont even go to an airport to pick anyone up, if i can not drive to where i need to go then i simply wont go, i know this wont work for everyone but i do cinsider myself fortunate it works for me
The airlines are indeed insane. Things like this:
a – Won’t stop terrorism,
b – Pisses of everyone
c – is exactly what tur’rists want.
“The World Trade Center will be rebuilt long before our common sense has returned and our freedoms restored”
Well yes, the WTC will be rebuild eventually, and that’s a lot sooner then “never ever ever”
Mojo, it’s not just the airline industry though. These people were booted from their flights because idiot passengers complained and ignorant airline personal complied. Scary stuff if you ask me.
As someone who’s never been on a plane, I can’t help but wonder with the way things are going, why do people even use planes anymore? Is any amount of saved time really worth the crap you go through?
“Is any amount of saved time really worth the crap you go through?”
Compare a 2 day straight drive from NYC to LA to a 5-6 hour flight. Yeah… that’s kinda worth it.
What I really dont understand is the basis for all this BS. Why would anyone want to blow up a plane? Hijack it OK that kinda make “sense”, but with todays bunkered cockpits hijacking has become quite complicated -so thats really leaves blowing up or some other mean to kill the ppl on the plain, but why?
If your main objective is to kill a bunch of ppl for some fcked up reason why choose targets that are behind a bunch of security barriers (and more to come)? For me this just doesn’t make any sense, but then again I might be looking for sense where there are none.
OK since im new here ill stop rambling.
Blowing up a plane has a lot of things going for it as an extremist:
- it makes people question a mode of transport which is a symbol of western technological prowess
- It causes massive disruption far greater than simply the plane itself (closing of all US airspace anyone?)
- Crashing the plane is generally very effective in casualty terms
- It makes all the world news
- it prays on our sense of security far more than blowing up a bus or restaurant
The sad truth is that there will always be wackos, and religion right now is just one ideal those wackos can bind to in order to do their fvcked up things. If religion didnt exist then we would still have extremists, they would just find a different cause for which to commit their acts.
What is important is that we stop giving these people *good reasons* to want to blow up planes. The US has to change its attitude towards Israel and the middle east and stop interfering forcefully in foreign politics, europe and the US have to stop artificially preventing the natural internal political evolution of foreign countries by selling them arms.
If the west is seen as being fair and even handed to people all over the world and to people of all faiths and creeds then we remove many of the motivations that inspire these people to target the west.
Dave
I started to type a lot of stuff to counter your arguments, but seeing I was really arguing for a change of targets(not in my interest really) ill stfu instead^^
Anyway, I totally agree with the last part of your post. From : “the sad truth” and to the end.
What is important is that as long as USA/Israel pose as a threat to the middle east there will not be any room for ppl in the middle east to speak up against their government/religious leaders. When facing an outer threat ppl unites. When ppl leave in peace and security they develop and oppose things they think are wrong within their own country.
I visited the US after 9/11 and was shocked by the way ppl in the US was thinking. Saying 2 words against the US government or your foreign policy ended up in serious threats and being labelled as a “USA hater” WTF…
Look at Lebanon. This country was developing fast. ppl could go from Islam to Christianity to common sense and back to Islam without any trouble from anyone. Religion was being weakened and ppl spoke openly against religious fanatics. What do you think will be the result after Israel bombing them and setting them back 20 years. Yeah that’s right. Religion gains ground and they will go through another 15-20 years of religious psychos ruling the country. Big applause for the fck ups in Israel.
E
gasmonso said:
“Mojo, it’s not just the airline industry though. These people were booted from their flights because idiot passengers complained and ignorant airline personal complied. Scary stuff if you ask me.”
Let me start by saying that I agree with you that this situation is silly.
That said, if you were the airline, and you had “more than one complaint” about “that weird guy over there,” how would you fix the situation? Since the airline is just in it for the cash, I’m not surprised that they kicked off the one guy causing “problems” to keep a bunch of other people happy.
Also, some people have an intense fear of flying, and have had it since long before 9/11. It’s all they can do to keep themselves from hyperventilating in their seat. I’m not one of those people, but I do get a little bit irrational nervousness on the runway. So I kinda understand why a guy who doesn’t look “normal” lurching around in his seat might raise a few already nervous eyebrows. Would I have complained? No. But the guy probably would have gone on my “People to Tackle If They Start Yelling and Running Toward the Cockpit” list. :-)
Since people are talking about reasonable (in the sense of feasable, not sane) terrorist threats, as opposed to the current system of looking at past threats and expecting them to happen again, last month’s IEEE Spectrum had a great article on the topic (that you don’t need to be a EE to understand), online and free unless I’m logged in by a cookie and don’t know it at http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/4422 .
As someone who’s never been on a plane, I can’t help but wonder with the way things are going, why do people even use planes anymore? Is any amount of saved time really worth the crap you go through?
It’s almost impossible to go from my country to any other without flying. (It might be possible to catch a ferry across to PNG then around Indonesia and eventually to mainland Asia, from where you can obviously drive anywhere but the Americas, but going to Europe like this’d be a trip you’d measure in months, not hours. Be nice for a holiday, totally impractical for business. And it’s conditional on there being ferries from PNG to Australia.)
I have learned to mostly ignore the rampant USA hating that is going on around the world, there really isn’t much that can be done with a barely trained monkey in office, so no need to get worked up. However, even though SkyClad put “good reasons” in quotes, I got the distinct feeling that he or she feels that the rest of what he said is at least marginally a good reason for blowing up a plane.
Let me state here in black and… avacado? that is complete bull. There is NO good reason for blowing up a civilian plane. Those people are just evil pieces of trash that should burn in hell, and since I don’t believe in hell its a damn shame we can’t keep them alive manufacture a hell just for them.
Regarding the sentiment that we (the USA) meddle too much, sure, agreed. It is unavoidable though, for a number of reasons that I wont get into in any detail here. One point though, if we DIDN’T involve ourselves in other peoples shitstorms, they would be bitching that we were isolationist stuckup pricks that take our plenty and keep it from the world. In other words, its a no-win situation. Oh yes, mistakes have been made, monumental ones. But show me a perfect government and I will wake your ass up from that dream.
Oh and the complaining pricks and crew that kicked that guy off the plane need to have their asses beat for being moronic dipshits. This from a very anti-organized religion Atheist. Notice I didnt say anti-religion. Religion is fine, but once those people start congregating in churches all hell breaks loose. When is the last time a wiccan blew up a plane?
A stupid act,removing the passenger from the airplane won’t solve a thing,it will only increase people’s fear and limit their freedom.
Look at this from another angle, if this guy would have been a muslim, what would have happend to him? I bet a full body & cavity search followed by a 12 hour questioning, and then when they made sure he wasn’t a terrorist, of course after checking his every living relative, and possibly recently dead ones, they release him with no appologies whatsoever, but a permanent mark on his record.
I live in Romania, right now a former comunist country, but it’s been 17 years since communism vanished, but people still acted the same way for a lot of time, and honestly, this whole anti-terrorist war, looks like the old comunist days …
As for fear of flying thank god i live in the middle of the continent, so i’d rather travel by train or car,
Maybe he was scared of flying and thus started praying. He did not even speak the language so things were probably already somewhat stressing to him and he merely did what he considered natural and started to pray. Maybe for protection to the flight even, hard to say without talking to the man.
You made some nice points there. I did a search on the subject and found the majority of people will go along with with your blog.