a flight to NYC christmas 2001

Submitted by myth (Germany), Jan 6, 2010 at 06:09

I agree with Dr Pipes that talking to people is the sophisticated method. Naturally it wise to start with those who judged from a perspective of common sense should be first in line. This sort of profiling is prejudiced, and it must be. I do understand that arabs feel humiliated in a body search exercise on an israeli airport. Maybe someone needs to tell them that bombs exploding on an aircraft are on the extreme end of being indiscriminate, if that is what they want for an equal treatment.

Even though I mandate profiling let me tell a story about my first flight to New York: The 911 terror attacks made me want to fly to New York, to see for myself and of course the flights were so cheap at the time of christmas 2001 as a result of the attacks. I booked a flight from Germany via London to JFK. On London's heathrow airport I had to travel quite a distance to the other end in order to change flights.

Looking out of the windows almost everbody working at the airport was some beardy guy, perfect Osama bin Laden look-alikes, maybe they were all Sikhs ? In the airport working at the terminals many pakistani looking people, probably all muslims. From a perspective of profiling maybe the radical islamists were already running the airport, or were they not ? When I boarded the aircraft today's newspaper was on many of the seats displaying a photo of Richard Reid who took a flight yesterday with those explosive-sneakers of his. I turned it upside down, no need to scare my girlfriend. Quite a number of oriental looking beardy people on board, anybody wearing sneakers ?

Standing in line for the bathroom I talked to many of them. It a appeared they were all jews. I expected 6 hours to be a long a flight but it wasn't. There was this questionnaire for all non-us passengers with all those questions wether or not I was a murderer or member of NAZI party or whatever. Sometimes the questions were somewhat tricky. I spent at least 3 hours helping people who had troubles with english fill out their forms. Maybe I even helped radicals into the US, I cannot tell. Answering the questions by immigration officers at JFK airport I set foot in the US. Finally I arrived in NYC safe with the one exception that I had the impression the rear weels would come off on that taxi into the city.

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