College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane!

[FearGod]

Mr. Makhzoomi said he was afraid, and that the employee spoke to him “like I was an animal.”

“I said to him, ‘This is what Islamophobia got this country into,’ and that made him so angry. That is when he told me I could not go back on the plane.”

Actually, this thread title and media title should not be: College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane!

A more accurate title is: College Student Not Allowed on Plane After Arguing With Security Personnel!

These type of articles are what I call trying to drum up Islamophobia-phobia!

The questioning person called in was an Arabic speaker and quite possibly a Muslim himself (although the article doesn't mention if he was Muslim or not and not that it should matter anyway).

I don't believe the one claiming knowing Arabic to be an Arabic woman, how the word "Allah" was understood to be dangerous.

 

[FearGod]

The Maltese people are in trouble !
They use Arabic words and north African accent !

The words and the face as well.

 

[Shad]

"A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/student-speaking-arabic-removed-southwest-airlines-plane.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://m.facebook.com/

My comment:
Too bad when Arabs get excited, they forget all languages they learned

This seems like a series of poor reactions. First being the passenger freaking out over a language they overheard. The second being how the employees and person in question reacted to the compliant and confrontation over whatever the passenger heard. He should of remained calm which would of made the compliant passenger and staff look foolish.

 

[Jainarayan]

The Maltese people are in trouble !
They use Arabic words and north African accent !

Yep, Maltese is basically Sicilian spoken in Arabic.

 

[freethinker44]

I don't believe the one claiming knowing Arabic to be an Arabic woman, how the word "Allah" was understood to be dangerous.

He was talking about ISIS. Going to go out on a limb and say that's what scared people, not the word "Allah".

 

[FearGod]

He was talking about ISIS. Going to go out on a limb and say that's what scared people, not the word "Allah".

Not true.

Makhzoomi said that he was then removed from the plane by an Arabic-speaking member of the Southwest staff, Shoaib Ahmed, who questioned him in the presence of security officers on the jetway about why he had been speaking Arabic on the plane.

Makhzoomi, a political science major who hopes to return to Iraq one day to help rebuild the nation, explained that he had been excitedly telling his uncle about an event he had attended the night before, a discussion with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. The student, who also runs a popular Facebook group devoted to national reconciliation in Iraq, had video of himself asking the secretary general a question about Iraq’s strategy for retaking territory from Islamic State militants. He showed it to the Southwest gate agent on his phone.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/18/hysteria-watch-iraqi-refugee-kicked-off-plane-speaking-arabic-l/

 

[Thief]

"A college student who came to the United States as an Iraqi refugee was removed from a Southwest Airlines flight in California earlier this month after another passenger became alarmed when she heard him speaking Arabic."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/student-speaking-arabic-removed-southwest-airlines-plane.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://m.facebook.com/

My comment:
Too bad when Arabs get excited, they forget all languages they learned

heard about this on the radio last night....
and I thought ....
the world has finally gone over the edge

 

[freethinker44]

Not true.

Makhzoomi said that he was then removed from the plane by an Arabic-speaking member of the Southwest staff, Shoaib Ahmed, who questioned him in the presence of security officers on the jetway about why he had been speaking Arabic on the plane.

Makhzoomi, a political science major who hopes to return to Iraq one day to help rebuild the nation, explained that he had been excitedly telling his uncle about an event he had attended the night before, a discussion with Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. The student, who also runs a popular Facebook group devoted to national reconciliation in Iraq, had video of himself asking the secretary general a question about Iraq’s strategy for retaking territory from Islamic State militants. He showed it to the Southwest gate agent on his phone.
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/18/hysteria-watch-iraqi-refugee-kicked-off-plane-speaking-arabic-l/

So... talking about ISIS then.
Look, there are certain things, regardless of race or ethnicity, that you don't talk about at the airport, a terrorist group is probably pretty high on that list.
You're not even allowed to joke about joking about these things in the airport.

Here's a humorous video that makes kind of shows this absurd reality of American airports. And this was even before all the heightened security.

 

[Smart_Guy]

Mr. Makhzoomi said he was afraid, and that the employee spoke to him “like I was an animal.”

“I said to him, ‘This is what Islamophobia got this country into,’ and that made him so angry. That is when he told me I could not go back on the plane.”

Actually, this thread title and media title should not be: College Student Is Removed From Flight After Speaking Arabic on Plane!

A more accurate title is: College Student Not Allowed on Plane After Arguing With Security Personnel!

These type of articles are what I call trying to drum up Islamophobia-phobia!

The questioning person called in was an Arabic speaker and quite possibly a Muslim himself (although the article doesn't mention if he was Muslim or not and not that it should matter anyway).

It all started here:

That is exactly what happened. An Arabic-speaking Southwest Airlines employee of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent came to his seat and escorted him off the plane a few minutes after his call ended, he said. The man introduced himself in Arabic and then switched to English to ask, “Why were you speaking Arabic in the plane?”
Mr. Makhzoomi said he was afraid, and that the employee spoke to him “like I was an animal.”

Escorting a passenger out of the plane then getting angry for a complaint on forcing him out of his seat to outside the plane? This a good way to start a problem to find an excuse to get rid of someone. Are you saying the employee would have certainly returned him back after escorting him out? Funny he's asked "why were you speaking Arabic in the plane". A stupid question. If the employee had any decency, he would have asked something like "what was it you said in Arabic on the phone" or something.

And the passenger who reported and started all of this is a hero, of course.

 

[George-ananda]

Escorting a passenger out of the plane then getting angry for a complaint on forcing him out of his seat to outside the plane? This a good way to start a problem to find an excuse to get rid of someone. Are you saying the employee would have certainly returned him back after escorting him out? Funny he's asked "why were you speaking Arabic in the plane". A stupid question. If the employee had any decency, he would have asked something like "what was it you said in Arabic on the phone" or something.

It's probably an employee following procedure. You don't do a security investigation on a plane in front of other passengers. Sensible people are polite and co-operative with security personnel doing their job. This guy had a chip on his shoulder and was apparently argumentative and if he would have been polite and co-operative he likely would have been allowed to return to his seat after the investigation.

And the passenger who reported and started all of this is a hero, of course.

I think you are seeing that aspect wrong. Most people probably see her as over-reactive. But if all co-operate with the system, no harm is done.

 

[Smart_Guy]

This seems like a series of poor reactions. First being the passenger freaking out over a language they overheard. The second being how the employees and person in question reacted to the compliant and confrontation over whatever the passenger heard. He should of remained calm which would of made the compliant passenger and staff look foolish.

This is the most sensible and logical post of all posts in this thread.

All three of them are stupid.

It's probably an employee following procedure. You don't do a security investigation on a plane in front of other passengers. Sensible people are polite and co-operative with security personnel doing their job. This guy had a chip on his shoulder and was apparently argumentative and if he would have been polite and co-operative he likely would have been allowed to return to his seat after the investigation.

I think you are seeing that aspect wrong. Most people probably see her as over-reactive. But if all co-operate with the system, no harm is done.

Dunno man. I can't imagine an airport security procedure of asking "why do you speak your language here". There are tons of ways to ask properly to get productive co-operation. Depending on the tone, this could sound extremely rude, which also gives a presumption of whether he was going back or not. But I agree. The Iraqi guy made a mistake of not treating the woman (a smile, for example) and the employee like children and played along. Maybe then, just maybe, the employee could have returned him back (still no certainty in that). I also don't believe over-reaction is a good thing.

 

[George-ananda]

Dunno man. I can't imagine an airport security procedure of asking "why do you speak your language here". There are tons of ways to ask properly to get productive co-operation. Depending on the tone, this could sound extremely rude, which also gives a presumption of whether he was going back or not. But I agree. The Iraqi guy made a mistake of not treating the woman (a smile, for example) and the employee like children and played along. Maybe then, just maybe, the employee could have returned him back (still no certainty in that). I also don't believe over-reaction is a good thing.

Here's the latest;


Southwest has an explanation for why it kicked an Arabic-speaker off its plane

Southwest Airlines has released a statement on why it removed Khairuldeen Makhzoomi, a Iraqi asylee and student at the University of California, Berkeley, from a flight on April 6. It says the passenger who reported Makhzoomi for making comments in Arabic that were “perceived to be threatening” during a phone conversation with his uncle in Baghdad was also an Arabic-speaker.

The nuance is important because many people on social media assumed that Makhzoomi was singled out for racist reasons, or for simply speaking Arabic. The airline says, “It was the content of the passenger’s conversation, not the language used, that prompted the report leading to our investigation.”

It is unclear, however, just how much Arabic the passenger who reported him speaks, or whether Southwest knew it, then or now. Multiple requests to the airline seeking to clarify this have yet to be returned.

Since the beginning, it’s been suggested that a linguistic misunderstanding was to blame. In the first report of the incident, Makhzoomi told the The Daily Californian that, after being taken off the plane, “[h]e learned the passenger thought she had heard the word ‘Shahid,’ meaning martyr, which is associated with jihad and has been associated with terrorists.”

But shahid—literally “witness” in Quranic Arabic—has a much wider connotation than that. Among Palestinians, for instance, anybody killed by Israeli security forces, and, in some cases even by the Palestinian security forces, is often called a shahid, whether militant or civilian or even a child. Around the world, Muslims may refer to someone who has died in natural disasters, in childbirth, of drowning, or even of stomach illness as a shahid.

News reports have also picked up (paywall) on Makhzoomi’s mention of the fact that he ended the phone call by saying he would call again when he landed “inshallah,” or “God willing.” In Arabic, inshallah is used liberally in all sorts of settings; for some Arabic-speakers, it’s practically a grammatical marker of the future tense.

 

[Smart_Guy]

It is unclear, however, just how much Arabic the passenger who reported him speaks, or whether Southwest knew it, then or now. Multiple requests to the airline seeking to clarify this have yet to be returned.

This speaks it all. Man, I can't believe a misunderstanding cause all this.

By the way, the one for martyr is pronounced /shaheed/ with ling /i/ while the one for witness is pronounced /shahid/ with short /i/.

 

[Godobeyer]

Yep, Maltese is basically Sicilian spoken in Arabic.

I am not sure about Sicilians , but Maltese language had many Arabic words

 

[Jainarayan]

I am not sure about Sicilians , but Maltese language had many Arabic words

Sicilian really is heavily influenced by Arabic and Greek. Yes, Maltese is heavily Arabic. In fact I think it's the only European language that uses Arabic script. Persian and Urdu are Indo-European and use it also.

 

[Godobeyer]

Sicilian really is heavily influenced by Arabic and Greek. Yes, Maltese is heavily Arabic. In fact I think it's the only European language that uses Arabic script. Persian and Urdu are Indo-European and use it also.

Thanks for this information

EDITED :
even Spanish had many Arabic words

 

[Jainarayan]

Thanks for this information

EDITED :
even Spanish had many Arabic words

Very, very many!

 

[Akivah]

He was talking about ISIS. Going to go out on a limb and say that's what scared people, not the word "Allah".

It's common for Muslim terrorists to shout 'Allah Akbar' in a crowd and then shoot anyone that doesn't shout that phrase back.

 

[Shad]

This is the most sensible and logical post of all posts in this thread.

All three of them are stupid.

People are becoming far too "primed" for such a reaction due to the media's emphasis on what certain people have said during their acts of violence. So people that share a common language become suspect on this basis when keywords and/or phrases are heard regardless of intent. It is just basing a stereotype on language rather than looks, religion, etc.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

My waitress was alarmed last week when I ordered dessert in Klingon

She is obviously an incompetent toh-pah! None nerds! I tell yeah!