Category Archives: Religion

TWAT: The War Against Tees Part Deux: Revenge of the Tees!

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From BoingBoing. If you need a refresher about The War Against Tees, click here.

It seems Arab-looking people are not allowed to wear Arabic lettering on their tee-shirts in American airports, or at least not if JetBlue has anything to do with it.

Now, I can tell you from personal experience that white people can.

It’s true the sample size wasn’t large, but it was in this case equal to the other test, so I’m calling it equivalent. And it’s also true that I was wearing it in gold, rather than printed on 100% cotton or even a poly/cotton blend, which would naturally be somewhat suspicious, especially in business class.

But then again, the only item I had that identified me as an Arab sympathizer was a nameplate necklace, the name of which did not correspond to the name on the expired passport I was carrying as my only ID.

And the nice formerly-Iranian lady at US Customs and Immigration who could, as it happened, read Arabic perfectly well, which is a helluva lot more than I can do, laughed when she read my passport and said “So I guess your name is not Cheryl then? That’s what your necklace says.”

And indeed it is not. I said that in that case my sister had my necklace, we shared a chuckle, she handed my passport back, and I got on the plane. End of story.

Then again, not only is my name not Cheryl, but I don’t even look like a Cheryl. 

More to the point, I don’t look like an Almira, either.

I am not a terrorist. I am just a t-shirt wearer

T-shirt: “I am not a terrorist,” in Arabic
Tim Murtaugh tells BoingBoing,

 After reading about blogger Raed Jarrar’s experience at JFK (he was forced to take off a shirt with Arabic writing on it or miss his flight), I finally stopped being depressed about the war on terror and began being proactively pissed off. I made this shirt, which says “I am not a terrorist” in Arabic. I plan to wear it every time I go to the airport from now on.

On the t-shirt site, Tim says: “All the shirts are set to $1.00 more than the Spreadshirt base price — all profits will be sent to the ACLU.”

TWAT: the war against t-shirts

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the war against tees

That’s a fine looking fellow, the guy on the left. And a fine looking shirt he’s got on, too. Can you read it? I can’t, which is why I had to read the article about him and his shirt and why it’s illegal at JFK.

The article that informs me that it is now illegal to wear a shirt with Arabic writing on it in American airports.

Yes, TWAT is now The War Against Tees.

Then I once again asked the three of them : “How come you are asking me to change my t-shirt? Isn’t this my constitutional right to wear it? I am ready to change it if you tell me why I should. Do you have an order against Arabic t-shirts? Is there such a law against Arabic script?”

so inspector Harris answered “you can’t wear a t-shirt with Arabic script and come to an airport. It is like wearing a t-shirt that reads “I am a robber” and going to a bank”.

I said “but the message on my t-shirt is not offensive, it just says “we will not be silent“. I got this t-shirt from Washington DC. There are more than a 1000 t-shirts printed with the same slogan, you can google them or email them at wewillnotbesilent@gmail.com . It is printed in many other languages: Arabic, Farsi, Spanish, English, etc.”

Inspector Harris said: “We cant make sure that your t-shirt means we will not be silent, we don’t have a translator. Maybe it means something else”.

I said: “But as you can see, the statement is in both Arabic and English“.

He said “maybe it is not the same message“…

At the point of almost missing his flight, he allows JetBlue to buy him another shirt to wear over the “illegal” one. Apparently, lots of people had called and ratted him out. Remind me to dig out the story of my Arabic necklace and the nice lady at US Customs and Immigration.

I put the t-shirt on and removed the price tag. I told the four people who were involved in the conversation: “I feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this. I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US was that I don’t want an officer to make me change my t-shirt. I will pursue this incident today through a Constitutional rights organization, and I am sure we will meet soon”.

If you want to call Jet Blue and ask about their regulations against Arabic script, you can use the following numbers:
* If calling within the U.S., Bahamas or Puerto Rico: 1-800-JETBLUE (538-2583)
* If calling from the Dominican Republic: 1-200-9898
* If calling from outside the U.S. or Dominican Republic: 001-801-365-2525
* Customers who are deaf or heard of hearing (TTY/TDD): 1-800-336-553

Raed Jarrar’s blog Raed in the middle

Secrets of Hezbollah’s Success

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Stolen from Ben Heine:

Hezbollah's winning the peace

1) Organizational Improvements

The central secret to Hezbollah‘s success is that it trained its guerrillas to make decisions autonomously at the small group level. (…) The result of this decentralization is that Hezbollah‘s aggregate decision cycles are faster and qualitatively better than those of their Israeli counterparts.

2) Hybrid Methods

Ancillary to the improvements in organizational design, Hezbollah also demonstrated its ability to supercharge antiquated conventional tactics with off-the-shelf technology to create weapons systems and hybrid tactics attuned to defeating Israeli military systems. We can expect to see this behaviour accelerate among non-state groups as readily available commercial technology continues its pace of radical improvement.

3)Extracting an Economic Toll

Hezbollah‘s success against Israel codifies two strategic methods that global guerrillas emulate. The first is the value of strategic coercion through economic attrition. Ongoing disruption of the Israeli economy through rocket attacks attaches a quantifiable strategic cost to the conflict. (…) Israel has been forced into an aggressive air campaign to accelerate progress on the ground against missile launch sites and interdict resupply of new missiles from Syria. This air campaign has backfired due to the asymmetry of targets, in that Israeli air strikes have alienated the Lebanese government and increased the moral cohesion of its foes.

4)Leveraging force protection and an aversion to casualties

A second strategic method is to trade territory for the blood of professional soldiers and delay. The intent is demonstrated by Hezbollah‘s dispersal of small units across a wide geographic area. This clearly shows Hezbollah‘s willingness to trade ground for the lives of Israeli soldiers and time. It succeeds by leveraging the aversion to casualties and dedication to force protection found in modern Western militaries (these men are professionally educated and therefore considered too valuable for use as cannon fodder).

Source : http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com
John Robb is the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.

South Park: the Secret Doctrine of Scientology

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Is it any wonder I love these guys? Fearless!

TWAT: new crime, flying while brown

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Raise fears, sink foes!

Rohinton Mistry had the right idea years ago; after being body-searched one too many times, he simply refused ever to fly into or through the United States again.

But it’s not just the US. Let’s go to BoingBoing for the report of panic-striken Brits fingering each other at airports. Although we could go anywhere in the blogosphere, really. This is major, major news.

Two brown men were forced off a plane by a bunch of non-brown British passengers who became convinced that they were behaving suspiciously and were therefore terrorists. Shocking — who’d have thought that putting signs everywhere telling you that you were in danger of terrorists and that terrorists were everywhere and that you should look out for suspicious terrorism behavior would turn normal people into witch-hunting racist mobs?

scared shitless and Proud!

The extraordinary scenes happened after some of the 150 passengers on a Malaga-Manchester flight overheard two men of Asian appearance apparently talking Arabic. Passengers told cabin crew they feared for their safety and demanded police action. Some stormed off the Monarch Airlines Airbus A320 minutes before it was due to leave the Costa del Sol at 3am. Others waiting for Flight ZB 613 in the departure lounge refused to board it…

Websites used by pilots and cabin crew were yesterday reporting further incidents. In one, two British women with young children on another flight from Spain complained about flying with a bearded Muslim even though he had been security-checked twice before boarding.

Link

Ahmed Farooq, the hottie doctorNow let’s look a little closer to home. Winnipeg, in fact, where we meet hottie doctor Ahmed Farooq, who was kicked off a flight for praying.

Naturally, the hotel room he where he had to spend the night, plus the flight home the next day, were out-of-pocket expenses that for which the airline takes no responsibility.

A Winnipeg doctor is demanding an official apology and compensation from United Airlines after being kicked off a flight in the U.S. this week, an incident he has characterized as “institutionalized discrimination.”   Dr. Ahmed Farooq, a Muslim, was escorted off an airplane in Denver on Tuesday. 

According to Farooq, reciting his evening prayers was interpreted by one passenger as an activity that was suspicious…

Farooq said the allegation came from a passenger who appeared drunk and had previously threatened him during the trip.

When flight personnel were alerted, the 27-year-old radiology resident and two colleagues — a man and a woman — were taken off their flight. They had been returning from a conference in San Francisco.

Farooq said that even officials from the Transportation Security Administration soon realized the flight crew had overreacted, but by the time that conclusion had been reached the trio were forced to stay in Denver for the night and catch a flight the next day — at their own expense.

“There’s no recourse,” Farooq said. “There’s no way to really be able to talk to anybody to really be able to reason it out. The police officers who talked to me afterwards and subsequent officials within the first three to five minutes, they were like, ‘You know what? The crew made a mistake. We apologize that they took you off. They overreacted.‘”  

Thank god I’m not tanned! But if I may be permitted this remark, I’d just like to say that, having checked out the picture, I wouldn’t mind detaining him…in my apartment!