Slow Motion.


You’re kidding, right?
October 14, 2006, 7:20 pm
Filed under: airport, news, terrorism

Apparently, a man was questioned at an airport after someone heard him speaking a ’suspicious’ language on his cell phone.

..

Seattle P-I had the story:

A 32-year-old man speaking Tamil and some English about a sporting rivalry was questioned at Sea-Tac Airport and missed his flight Saturday because at least one person thought he was suspicious.

The Port of Seattle dispatched its police officers to investigate the case, which occurred Saturday around noon, said Bob Parker, airport spokesman. The Chicago man was preparing to board an American Airlines flight to Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

The man was speaking Tamil, a language largely used in India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, on his cell phone at the departure gate and on the aircraft. An off-duty airline employee heard the conversation and informed the flight crew.

The man also apparently said something in English about a sporting rivalry at his alma mater.

“It’s a big misunderstanding,” said Parker. “He had a perfectly innocent explanation that all added up.”

Parker said it is incumbent on airport officials to investigate reports of suspicious activity.

“It’s hard to triage over the phone,” he said.

But Parker had no explanation as to why a man speaking Tamil, which is spoken worldwide, would be considered suspicious. The person who contacted airport officials could give an answer to that question, he added.

Parker said the man was cooperative and boarded a later flight to Texas. He told officials that he would not speak in a foreign language on his cell phone at an airport in the future.

Cool. We’ll all be much safer when all international airports start checking all foreign-speaking people. We’ll nip those wannabe terrorists right in the butt.


11 Comments so far
Leave a comment

Morgan Spurlock (of ‘Super Size Me) did a great show on a Christian man having to live with a Muslim family for a month, as a Muslim in traditional wear. When he was walking through the airport of his home town, I couldn’t believe the nasty looks people were giving him. A few of them looked downright scared too (and he was a ‘white’ guy!).

Comment by imablank

Ah, interesting. Any chance you remember what it was called? I’m gonna see if I can hunt it down. :)

Comment by julenka

It’s because any language that isn’t English or European is clearly the “terrorist” language. That’s the language of Terroristan, population: unknown.

Comment by The Editor

This sounds like the suggested UK security policy of handing out, essentially, crib sheets with “terrorist attributes”.

Presumably, these include brown skin, turbans and AK-47s.

Comment by notwelshman

That’s the language of Terroristan, population: unknown.

More like, Population: Everyone but Us.

This sounds like the suggested UK security policy of handing out, essentially, crib sheets with “terrorist attributes”.

Sounds like a good idea! Let’s hand these out to everyone, so they, too, can protect themselves from the evil terrorist next door. Oh, what was that? The terrorist will see this list too? It doesn’t matter, my friend. The terrorists aren’t smart enough to figure out how to get around our racist laws. ;) We’re way smarter than them.

Comment by julenka

Heh. I’m sure one of the Airplane films mocked this sort of thing.

But this was honestly considered, as this link will attest:
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3975

And people say we don’t live in a police state… Still, I imagine I’ll have to work something like this out when I rule the world.

Comment by notwelshman

That magazine article.. ugh. Racial profiling gets my goat, you know?

Comment by julenka

Yup. Profiling was still being discussed heavily a month or two ago, following the security scares at Heathrow Airport. Terrifying.

Comment by notwelshman

I think that’s probably one of the things that most scares/annoys me about all this terrorism business: it’s allowed people to express their latent racism in a sociall-acceptable way. Point it out to them, though, and you’ll be called all sorts of names, starting with ‘terrorist sympathiser’. :p

And I’m not. I’m not a terrorist sympathiser. I’m a people-who-get-called-terrorists-but-are-innocent sympathiser, and there are too many of those these days.

Comment by julenka

True enough.

It’s interesting – to go on a slight tangent – how far we actually are from true racial equality-of-acceptance these days. It’s little things. Did you know that, in a certain village in Cornwall, they celebrate Darkie Day? Or that the city of Hull apparently has social values that – compared to the rest of the UK – are dated by about 40 years?

It’s the twenty-first century, and we’re still trying to make excuses for not liking people who picked a different page of the Dulux catalogue for skin colours. Sad stuff.

Comment by notwelshman

Holy crap on the second link! Especially this:

Last year members of the notorious Hull Cruise Club were jailed for up to 18 years for running down an asylum seeker with a car.

Lovely people.

And that ‘Darkie Day’ picture is ..quite bad. I’m surprised this still happens. Sad stuff indeed.

Comment by julenka

[...] The story I blogged about previously, about a man questioned at an airport for ’speaking a foreign language’, or this new incident, where four North African Muslim men have been fired from their airport security jobs for ..wait for it: “not [having] shown that their behaviour was unlikely to violate airport security”. [...]

Pingback by Slow Motion.




Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <pre> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>