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Have We Learned Nothing?
Opinion · June 6, 2002

So now airlines are removing passengers for no reason other than that they look Middle Eastern. That's the charge against four carriers made by the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit filed last week, a case that has unsettled, if not surprised many travelers.

It's only human to be troubled by charges that these government-subsidized businesses purged innocent passengers from flights after Sept. 11 because of objections from other travelers or flight crews rather than legitimate security concerns.

But surprise? Anyone who believes that such behavior is impossible in a country of enlightened and educated citizens is ignorant of our history - a sad legacy of discrimination that extends far beyond the racial and ethnic stereotyping the airlines now stand accused of.

Ending these abhorrent practices isn't as easy as winning a single lawsuit. It's a matter of understanding that ejecting a passenger who looks different, or dangerous, is a symptom of a more widespread ailment our society suffers from: an endemic strain of xenophobia.

Just ask Hassan Sader, who was kicked off an American Airlines flight last October after he boarded the aircraft. The Moroccan-born U.S. citizen reportedly noticed a female passenger and a flight attendant talking and looking in his direction. Minutes later, an airline agent asked him to leave the plane. He was rebooked on another flight, issued a $10 meal voucher but denied an explanation or apology.

Or talk to Arshad Chowdhury, who was taken off a Northwest Airlines flight and denied passage on any of the carrier's flights even after being cleared by the airport police, airline security officials and the FBI. His crime? The pilot had found a "phonetic similarity" between Chowdhury's name and someone on Northwest's watch list.

Similar stories are told by passengers on Continental Airlines and United Airlines, two of the other carriers named in the ACLU lawsuit. Stories of travelers with dark skin and foreign-sounding names being denied transportation for no valid reason.

We've seen this before, in the internment of Japanese civilians during World War II, in the hysteria of McCarthyist witch-hunts, and even in the Jim Crow laws of the late 19th Century. We feared what was different - whether it was racial, ethnic or ideological. We reacted inappropriately.

Ironically, history repeated itself only a day after the ACLU filed its lawsuits. The Justice Department announced it would propose new regulations to require tens of thousands of Muslim and Middle Eastern visa holders to register with the government and be fingerprinted. The federal government might as well have submitted a friend of the court brief supporting the four airlines who removed the passengers of Middle Eastern descent from their flights.

In a free society, we don't just have the luxury of public introspection. We have an obligation to look at ourselves and ask: are our actions justified? Is our policy reasonable? Or are we reacting now, as we have in the past, in a way we'll later regret?

Our xenophobia is curable. But first we must want to be healed.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.