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?

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

Now 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!