There is just so much that doesn’t ring true about this latest round of “Flying While Muslim” grievance theater.
In the first place, what is this about requesting an unopened can for “hygienic reasons”? The mainstream media, of course, never asks Tahera Ahmad what she means by that. What’s unhygienic about getting a can of soda that has just been opened? Could it be that Ahmad found it objectionable to receive a can of soda opened by najis (unclean, cf. Qur’an 9:28) infidel hands?
And then there’s the passenger sitting across the aisle from her and telling her, “You Moslem, you need to shut the F** up.” Where are the passengers corroborating the words of this shouting lout? Someone must have heard him, but he sounds to me as if he was sent over from Islamophobia Central Casting, straight from the fever dreams of Hamas-linked CAIR and the like.
Finally, there is the most unbelievable aspect of her whole story — a part of it that is never mentioned by the mainstream media: “The pilot also apologized for everything that happened and said that as a white male he recognized his privilege…” Come on. Who talks like that, outside of Salon.com’s offices?
Anyway, given today’s political climate, Tahera Ahmad will probably get millions out of United, and no flight attendant will ever dare open a Muslim’s can again.
“Muslim Woman Says She Faced Discrimination on Flight, United Airlines Calls It ‘Misunderstanding,'” by Emily Shapiro, ABC News, June 1, 2015:
After a Muslim woman accused the crew of a United Airlines flight of discrimination, the company has apologized for what it called a “misunderstanding.”
The passenger said a United attendant on the flight from Chicago to Washington on Friday refused to give her an unopened can of coke, allegedly telling her it could be used “as a weapon.”
“The flight attendant brought over an open can of diet soda, so I requested, for hygienic reasons, a closed can of diet soda,” Tahera Ahmad, a chaplain at Northwestern University, told ABC’s Chicago station WLS on Sunday. “And so she said, ‘Well, no one has consumed from this can.’ And I said, ‘That’s fine but I would really prefer for hygienic reasons and health concerns.’ … She said, ‘Well, it is against our policy to give people unopened canned beverages.'”
“And then she said, ‘No diet coke for you,’ and she picked up the beverage from my tray table and took it back,” she said.
Ahmad said the same flight attendant then served an unopened can of beer to another passenger.
When she confronted the attendant, “She said it is against our policy to give people unopened can beverages because they may use it as a weapon.”
“So I said, ‘Well I think that’s strange because you’re discriminating against me because clearly you gave the passenger next to me an unopened beverage can.’ And so she looked at that, picked it up, opened it and put it back. And as she was putting it back she said, ‘It’s because you would use it as a weapon.'”
“At that point I was in utter shock,” she told WLS. “I was almost tearing up.”
Ahmad said she then asked the other passengers, “Did you all just witness this discrimination?” and she claims another passenger muttered “you Muslim” and told her to shut up.
“And he said, ‘You know you would use it as a weapon,'” Ahmad recounted.
“I just couldn’t believe what he had said,” Ahmad said. “I was in tears.”
The attendant apologized after the flight, Ahmad said, but she told the attendant that her actions made her feel “very threatened.”
“I was the one who felt very unsafe,” Ahmad said.
United Airlines said today in a statement to ABC News: “United is a company that strongly supports diversity and inclusion, and we and our partners do not discriminate against our employees or customers. The flight attendant onboard Shuttle America flight 3504 attempted several times to accommodate Ms. Ahmad’s beverage request after a misunderstanding regarding a can of diet soda.”…