Nothing to fear except fear itself: Southwest Airlines accused of profiling Muslims

SOUTHWEST Airlines has come under fire for its supposedly targeting Muslim flyers. In one incident last week, reported by NBC, Anas Ayyad, who runs a pizza restaurant in Philadelphia, and his friend Maher Khalil, were asked to step aside before boarding the plane. The problem was caused when a fellow passenger, who had heard them talking in Arabic, claimed to be too afraid to fly with them. When they learnt that they would be denied entry onto the flight, Mr Khalil telephoned 911. “I didn't know what to do, so I called the cops," NBC reports Mr Khalil as having said. The pair were later allowed back on board.

That incident followed another last week in which six people of Middle Eastern descent were reportedly ejected from a Southwest flight after, according to ABC, they had asked passengers around them whether they could swap seats so that the group could sit together. This apparently raised other passengers’ concerns. Those flyers were re-booked on a later flight.

That air travellers feel spooked at the moment is understandable. Still, it must be worse for people who feel the eyes of their fellow passengers skewer them with suspicion. As Ahmed Rehab of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, quoted in the Guardian, says: “The threshold for 'see something, say something' is meant to apply to suspicious behaviour, not personal prejudices against minorities engaging in non-suspicious behaviour.” The paper also makes the excellent point that, at a time when a calm and level-headed response is required, two Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, seem determined to make political capital by stoking hysteria. Mr Trump's call for a database of all Muslim Americans, so that they may be more easily tracked, is not helpful.

There will be those who argue that, with limited resources, it makes sense to target those most likely to commit an act of airborne terrorism—young Muslim men. But in the two Southwest cases, it was the passengers themselves conducting their own vigilante profiling; the airline was merely bowing to their demands. And in any case, such thinking is far too simplistic. As our piece on the subject last week explained:

The main reason why airport security is so bad, says [security consultant Philip] Baum, is that it tries to find things instead of focusing on the people who might carry them. Issy Boim, a former Shin Bet officer who worked closely with Israel’s airline, El Al, argues that whereas the Americans are looking for weapons, the Israelis “are looking primarily for the terror suspect”. Mr Baum is a strong advocate of what is known as “profiling”— building a picture of both passengers and airline staff. He rejects the idea that this has to be based on crude stereotyping (being suspicious of all young Muslim men, for example). It should be based on behaviour both prior to flying—for example, when, how and where a ticket was purchased—and at the airport itself.

In the days immediately after the attacks on the London underground network in 2005, I remember my own feeling of tension whenever “a man who matched the profile”—young, Middle-Eastern looking—got into my carriage. No matter how many times I slapped my mental-self across the face and told it to grow up, it is possible to accept that a climate of fear does funny things to people. But, in such a climate we are much better served by not pandering to our irrationality. Everyone would be a lot happier for it.

The Economist