Panicky Brits

Driving while black got you down? Try flying while (South) Asian in Engand. I say England, because I don't think the situation is nearly as bad in the United States. Two young 'Asian'--i can't stand the British word for all brown people--students from Manchester made it through airport security and boarded a plane bound for Manchester from Malaga before the rest of the passengers heard them speak what sounded like Arabic (I'm guessing it was Hindi or Urdu, neither of which sound anything like Arabic... and so what if it was Arabic?). Then, the passengers refused to allow the plane to leave until the two boys were removed from the plane. One passenger described what she saw to the Daily Mail:

"The plane was not yet full and it became apparent that people were refusing to board. In the gate waiting area, people had been talking about these two, who looked really suspicious with their heavy clothing, scruffy, rough, appearance and long hair.

"Some of the older children, who had seen the terror alert on television, were starting to mutter things like, 'Those two look like they're bombers.'

"Then a family stood up and walked off the aircraft. They were joined by others, about eight in all. We learned later that six or seven people had refused to get on the plane."

..."While we were waiting, everyone agreed the men looked dodgy. Some passengers were very panicky and in tears. There was a lot of talking about terrorists."

This is absurd. Looks like the failed attempt to terrorize last week wasn't a complete failure after all. Think this is an isolated incident involving a bunch of exceptionally paranoid individuals? Think again:

Websites used by pilots and cabin crew were yesterday reporting further incidents. In one, two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding.

There are brown Muslim people everywhere. A very, very, very small percentage of them are planning to blow up planes. Perhaps that percentage is growing in England, but I can't be sure. Perhaps it is growing precisely because of how alienated some of them are made to feel by the rest of their society on a daily basis. I took a trip to Birmingham last year and was, for the first time in a really long time, hurled vocal racist insults by someone who thought that I and others in my family were "Pakis." Obviously I can't claim that this is representative behavior in any way whatsoever, but in all of my time in the United States and Canada I've faced nothing even remotely as overtly racist as that single remark (once, during my time in Sydney, Australia, some drunk girls on the street kept calling me a curry muncher. They were angry because one of 'my people' wouldn't let them in a bar. She pointed across the street at the Coogee Bay Hotel's bouncer, who was a very large man of Maori descent. The incident was too funny for me to be offended...plus, it made me hungry for curry).

I have support for my observation in a New York Times article in Monday's issue entitled Pakistanis Find U.S. an Easier Fit than Britain, which compares the Pakistani community in Chicago, which has integrated nicely with other communities in the area, with Pakistani communities in England that, according to the article, have not been able to assimilate culturally, and that, additionally, are worse off economically than their American counterparts. I'm not so sure if this comparison is relevant, or if England's failure to integrate their 'Asians' is really a cause of terror plots. Gautam Malkani, author of Londonstani, wrote an op-ed in the Times in which he tries to undermine the claim that young Asians are left out of British mainstream culture at all.

Wherever the blame lies for the alleged terrorist attempt in England, the British government and members of its media should make sure to counter the widespread and self-fulfilling belief that Muslims are more likely than anyone else to commit acts of terrorism. Acting as if this is true will further alienate young men like the two pictured above and create extremists where there previously were none. The Bush administration doesn't help anything by declaring a war on 'Islamic Fascism' (why even say Islamic there? Why was 'Christian' not mentioned when describing the terrorists from Northern ireland), but at least Bush did a fairly decent job after 9/11 of repeatedly suggesting that Islam is a peaceful religion and that American Muslims were just as American as anyone else.