This report comes from a local UK paper, Wakefield Today: "Terror on plane" (thanks to Kemaste). They locked themselves in the bathroom and were banging on the walls. This is a strange story, but Islamic prayer, which one said was what he was doing, doesn't involve banging on walls.
A BUSINESSMAN from Wakefield was caught up in 9/11 panic on a flight from Cyprus when two Muslim passengers were arrested for suspicious behaviour.Paul Teasdale said chaos erupted when the two men were hauled off by police in Larnaca on Sunday – the fourth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The 38-year-old, who runs his own electrics business, said the flight was minutes away from leaving when the incident happened.
He said: “We noticed two men in full Muslim dress get on the plane and one of them passed me to go to the toilet.
“He was in there for a while and eventually the stewardess knocked on the door to find out what he was doing. He told her he was praying.
“He then sat back down, but she must have smelt a rat because about 10 minutes later two policemen came on board to take them off. After that it was just pandemonium.”
Mr Teasdale, of Wood Lane, Overton, said after the men were removed some passengers refused to stay on board.
He added: “Women were crying and everyone was getting a bit excited. Then someone said ‘hang on a minute, it’s 9/11’. It sounds stupid now, but at the time we were thinking of our lives.”...
Sue Lister, spokeswoman for Excel Airways, said the men were taken off the plane as they were acting “anti-socially”. She said: “One of the men ran down to the rear toilet, one to the front. They locked themselves in and were banging on the walls. It was not normal behaviour. The decision was taken to offload them and the captain made the decision to delay the flight.”
Their ethnicity was not a factor, she said. She added: “Hopefully the passengers realise the reason for the decision.”
Ethnicity? Why should ethnicity have anything to do with it? We are facing an ideology, not an ethnicity.
I believe I have solved the mystery in this obvious misunderstanding. The accused was praying in the restroom. He accidentally dropped his Koran in the toilet. He was banging on the wall for help while praying louder to be forgiven for his accident.
The fellow in the second restroom was appalled that the paper stand was on the right. He was knocking for someone to help him or possibly in anger.
Yes, these incidenst are strange indeed. Such actions stand in contrast to the gracefulness of Islam. I think the autorities acted with dilligence. It almost sounds like they wanted to delay the flight.
Within Islam generally...when entering or leaving a house, do not push the door violently, or slam it shut, or leave it to close by itself wildly. Close the door quietly with your hand.
You may have heard a Hadith reported by Imam Muslim whereby 'Aisha (RA) quotes the Prophet: 'Gentleness adorns every act. Its absence will tarnish it.'
I teach my childrens to be quiet and gentle. Be considerate. Do not cause any undue noise when entering or exiting. You have heard the saying of the Prophet (PBUH): 'Whoever is deprived of gentleness, is deprived of all sorts of goodness.' Muslim and Al-Tirmidhi reported that the honourable companion Al-Miqdad bin Al-Aswad (RA) said: 'We used to preserve the Prophet's share of the milk, when he came back at night he would greet us with a voice loud enough for those awake to hear, without disturbing those who were asleep.'
My father taught me an important manner - do not sleep among sitting people and do not sit among sleeping people.
I guess they could have been frustrated that Al Jazeera Airways are not taking bookings yet & these good Muslims were horrified at the thought of travelling the 3 hours in Infidel Class.
Naseem:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but somehow, with the strictures of Islam calling for cleanliness in prayer, I could buy that they were using the toilets to clean themselves in preparation for prayer. However, I find it hard to accept that observant Muslims would actually consider a watercloset on a plane as an appropriate place to offer prayers.
Ah, sister Naseem, verily, the traditions have been adapted well to present day circumstances!
From Sahih Muslim:
Book 021, Number 4810:
Shaddid b. Aus said: Two are the things which I remember Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) having said: Verily Allah has enjoined goodness to everything; so when you kill, kill in a good way and when you slaughter, slaughter in a good way. So every one of you should sharpen his knife, and let the slaughtered animal die comfortably.
From an article in Slate, ellipsis inserted:
http://slate.msn.com/?id=2057464&device
Mohamed Atta's 13th instruction, found on the first page of his letter, is an order to his co-conspirators to inspect their weapons before departure. Atta then adds an excerpt from a hadith[...]. Atta's excerpt from the hadith reads, "Let each of you sharpen his blade and make his victim comfortable."
See, Gentleness in All Things, even decapitation!
Offering salat (prayer) is forbidden in toilets and graveyards, so the guy's claim that he was praying was just taqiyya. What do the kuffar know about the etiquette of salat? War is deceit!
JS, I'm afraid such is the complexity of Islam.
Certainly it seems your upbringing as an child of Islam is absolutely crucial.
Being an Ahmadi, we have a Mehdi (the 4th) and I can tell you he is a very gentle man indeed. He travels round the world trying to impress goodness within the muslim community. Now, as a child I was brought up with TLC and have been fortunate enough to have a kind & loving husband together with two wonderful children.
I am not nieve enough to think this is so everywhere. Islam can be biased against women, it can be hard on children, and it can be effective in turning hatred on. Often this is as a result of poverty, greed and jelousy. I know that many muslims who don't have blame the west for not having as opposed to not getting off thier backside and doing something about it.
I suppose the "diametrics" of the religion have been brought up well when you weigh what I said versus what you said. .....Like I said...it depends on your childhood on which brand you will carry forward.
They sound like a couple of jackass wannabes to me. Apartheid is coming. One plane for muslims, another for infidels. You know it makes sense.
Perhaps a "Muslims-only" airline should be established -- Muslims-only except for the pilots, lest the plane head you-know-where -- and with a locked cabin, and possibly armed guards every few feet. Then Muslims can travel on that airline (oh, it can be a very big airline) and on no other. There would still be a security problem on other airlines for non-Muslims, for there will still be Muslim terrorists acting on the tenets of Islam as they not unreasonably interpret them, to conduct the Jihad by "striking terror" in the hearts of the enemy. But millions if not billions of man-hours in security-checks that are needless, would be saved each year, and in other ways, this would be a good solution. Islam divides the world between Believer and Infidel. As there is nothing that can be done to Islam (the canonical texts are immutable, and the gates of ijtihad slammed shut a thousand years ago, and self-dramatizing Irshad Manji is not about to swing them open), then Infidels too, should come to regard the world as divided in this way. The world's main division is now that between Believer (Muslim) and Infidel (non-Muslim). That makes a lot of sense. It helps clear the mental air. It makes a policy of self-defense against the Jihad much more possible. No more worries over what constitutes a "moderate" Muslim or how to keep a "moderate" safely and forever "moderate," or how to make sure that the "moderate" Muslim's children do not turn out, for on reason or another, to be "immoderate" (like some of those London bombers). No: Infidel and Muslim.
That's what they believe. That's what they think. That's what many of them have acted upon in dar al-Islam, over a very long period, and given half a chance, that's exactly how they would act in what, for now, is still the Bilad al-kufr, the Lands of the Infidels.
So we should belief, distinguish, in precisely the same way -- it's the only way to protect ourselves.
Mr. Spencer writes: Ethnicity? Why should ethnicity have anything to do with it? We are facing an ideology, not an ethnicity.
Ethnicity is a factor because Islam has obvious ethnic accents. Islam is not composed of equal parts blonde Scandinavians, pale doughy-faced Germans, redheaded freckle-faced Irish, lanky Slavs, dark black Africans, tanned Arabs, phacoid-eyed SE Asians, etc.
The predominant ethnic accents of Islam are, in fact, recognizable. Look at the photos of the last few hundred terrorists over the last 30 years. When law enforcement rationally tries to prevent future attacks from a group, and 98% of the photos of past perpetrators look a certain way, it would be the height of folly not to construct a profile accordingly. It is also the height of folly for analysts & observers to pretend like there are no ethnic accents to this problem.
When it comes to matters of life and death and self-defense against an enemy that can strike at random and suicidally mass-murder innocents anyplace, anytime, then even measures of, as Spencer have termed them before, "limited value" (i.e., ethnic profiling) must be pursued. (What does "limited value" mean, anyway? Every measure is of "limited value", since no measure has "unlimited value".)
Spencer has also written elsewhere: "...given the fact that "Arab" does not equal "Muslim,"..."
No one with their eyes open about the threat of Islam (such as we here at jihadwatch) could possibly deny that there are innumerable Muslim Arabs who need to be surveilled and searched. Just because there also happen to be innumerable non-Arab Muslims doesn't mean that profiling Arabs would not have effective value.
It is possible to profile Arabs and also profile Muslims in general -- Arabs would be a subcategory of Muslims which we would give a degree of extra attention to. It is only rational to accord extra degrees to phenomena that exert an extra degree, and Arab Muslims so far are more likely to be terrorist than, say, SE Asian Muslims (which is not to say that SE Asian Muslim terrorists do not exist -- of course they do; I am talking about NUMBERS here, not the simple-minded binary choice of Yes/No, Black/White).
What we clearly can't do is profile everyone -- which seems to be the current theory leading to our current policy of mechanically random searches. Another subgroup of Muslims to which we should give a degree of extra attention are Pakistani Muslims, it seems. A third subgroup would be North African, to the extent that they are distinguishable from Arabs (a lot of historical interbreeding there can make this more difficult).
A rational self-defense would reflect the ethnic accents of Islam through some sort of prioritizing hierarchy -- Arabs deserving the most attention, Pakistanis second most, North Africans third, etc.
"Profiling", Spencer wrote elsewhere, "would not have caught John Walker Lindh or José Padilla."
No system of profiling is perfect. A few exceptions will get through the cracks. It would be irrational, however, to let those rare exceptions, such as a Lindh or Padilla or the black Jamaican Jermaine Lindsay of the London bombing, have equal weight with the preponderant numbers that outweigh them.
Nor is any rational system of profiling static; it should change with new data. If we started to see a trend where white converts like Lindh or Adam Gadahn began to OUTNUMBER (let alone even come close to EQUALING) Arab Muslim terrorists, then of course our profiling should flexibly adapt to that reality.
Methinks that Mr. Spencer is rather disingenuously camouflaging an ethical distaste for racial profiling behind language couched purely in pragmatic terms ("of limited value"; "ideology not race"; "Ethnicity? We are facing an ideology, not an ethnicity."; etc.), with no hint or trace that he thinks racial profiling is ethically wrong.
Rational law enforcement, in the context of self-defense against random, horrible attacks on innocents, when dealing with unmanageably large numbers of people requires categorization and prioritization. Which means, profiling based upon any relevant criteria.
Islam can be biased against women, it can be hard on children, and it can be effective in turning hatred on. Often this is as a result of poverty, greed and jelousy.
Naseem, are you saying that the bias against women is the result of poverty? That's a real cop-out if I ever saw one. What about the many suras in the Koran and the Hadiths that are quite clearly extremely biased against women?
Nasseem sez:
"...Often this is as a result of poverty, greed and jelousy..."
Strange.
While the Mohammedans would have us believe they are above such lowly sentiments, of which they regularly accuse Westerners...
Razdan:
Naseem did qualify her remark with "often" and it's a fair-enough observation given the very low standing even oil-rich Muslim nations have on the HDI. (incredibly, both Saudi Arabia and Iran rank at half of the HDI that the Palestinians in the "occupied" territories had, Intifada II notwithstanding.
Yes, we know that many jihaddists come from comfortably middle class and better status and the funders of jihad are rich beyond contemplation. However, the cultural roots are very much the hard scrabble existence of the Bedioun nation that needed control over the local oasis just to survive. Dr. Richard Landes, a medieval scholar at Boston U wrote on this subject, and I think I've read similar POVs coming from Muslim sources, translated by MEMRI.
This has nothing to do with the article but I had an interesting muslim/restroom experience the other day.
The place I work at has a fairly high muslim population.There is a public restroom that has 4 stalls and several urinals.
The other day I was going in and the stalls were full so I waited until one opend up.
The first one out was a muslim guy with the Abe Lincoln beard.
I walk into the stall and the lid is up and the whole floor is soaked.At first I thought it was pee but then it looked more like water.
I backed out and a few seconds later another stall opened up.
So I'm sitting there listnening to the muslim guy suck water up his nose to drive out the Devil.
This sound I have heard many times before but until I started learning about islam I didn't know what they were doing.
Anyway,I'm sitting there trying to figure out what the guy was doing in the stall to cause all that mess and then it dawns on me.
That filthy bastard was in there washing his feet in the toilet.
That's the only thing I can think of.
I guess the grand pubah should have been a little more specific when he said wash you feet.
JLP
Naseem said "JS, I'm afraid such is the complexity of Islam."
Islam is quite complex; it takes decades of diligent study in the madrasses to memorize the numerous ways to slaughter the infidels and the copious Qur'anic quotations to justify it.
It is so polite and refined of Muhammed to close the door quietly behind him after he murders the infidel families inside their house.
Perhaps they were only flagellating themselves.
Can't a guy flagellate in private?
John Lee
I remember an argument in the East End factory where I had a holiday job about 30 years ago.
This argument blew up between Pakistani Muslim women and every other woman in the workshop (white, black and Jewish) over the puddles on the lavatory floor.
The Moslem women ignored the paper (which was plentiful, I know that as my dad was ic maintenance and my aunt was a cleaner)prefering to use water. They said the other women were dirty because they did not wash like them.
The others said the Moslems were dirty because of the dangerous slippery mess they left behind them.
My old man sent a forelady to sort it out. She said she didn't mind what anybody choose to use on their bottoms in private but the floors were to be left clean and safe afterwards.
It is so polite and refined of Muhammed to close the door quietly behind him after he murders the infidel families inside their house.
Great posting, special_guest!
"You are just picking on me because I am ......."
( fill in the blank )
Ahh... Granny its just sub-continental thing...
Most Asian Bathrooms dont have carpets... Guess why?
Naseem,
I am inclined to agree with your point about upbringing; I think that the Ahmadiyya brand is somewhat moderate. They seem to have been the only branch of Islam that has condemned violence without the disingenous qualifiers that the other branches have used in their suspect condemnations.
On the Ahmadiyya website I recall reading calls to the above. Only thing bothering me was that they were still playing the came of "Jihad = Internal Struggle", which we all know to be specious, given the volumes dedicated to the violent true Jihad.
"they were still playing the came of "Jihad = Internal Struggle", which we all know to be specious, given the volumes dedicated to the violent true Jihad."
The "internal struggle" type of Jihad is also dangerous: it is Islam's psychological technique for instilling uncritical, unskeptical, un-individualistic, slavish obedience.
The main form of externalized violent Jihad is built upon the "internal struggle" Jihad.
Thanks Granny,I hadn't considered the butt washing thing,but I do remember reading about it.
Maybe the guys on the plane were beating on the walls out of extreme pain when they splashed that blue juice all over thier rectum.
JLP
Maybe the guys on the plane were beating on the walls out of extreme pain when they splashed that blue juice all over thier rectum.
JLP
Posted by: John Lee Pedimore
You are all too good today...LOL
Hugh said "Perhaps a "Muslims-only" airline should be established..."
I'm sorry sir, we have a strict policy of 3 carry-on and 2 check-in bombs per passenger. You're just going to have to detonate your others in the waiting area prior to boarding.