Let’s look on the bright side of this infuriating story.
Khalil, 29 and Ayyad, 28, moved to Philadelphia from Palestine 15 years ago. Khalil now owns the Feltonville pizza shop — Pizza Point — that gave him his first job. The friends were in Chicago visiting each other’s families and met back at the airport Wednesday night to take the same flight home. The gate agent told them apologetically they wouldn’t be allowed to board because a passenger was afraid to fly with them after overhearing the men speaking Arabic.
So they called the police, and argued, and finally, after a delay, were allowed to board the plane. It’s totally unjust that someone can just whine about a fellow passenger’s religion or language and get them kicked off.
But…you know, last time I was on a flight, there was a Catholic priest in all the sombre regalia boarding the plane with me.
You can see where this is going.
Can I go to the gate agent and claim that I am afraid to fly with a member of a child-raping cult that worships death? Because that is just as reasonable as claiming I’m afraid that a couple of pizza guys were a danger because they didn’t speak English to each other. But hey, if airlines are going to bend over so much to avoid defying the bigotry of their passengers, we could start acting as stupid as those fools and be really annoying.
Except, unfortunately, that I have no interest in competing in the idiocy race with bigots, and generally when I’m boarding a plane I just want to get the process over with and get to my destination.
Also, I doubt that they would care what an atheist fears, anyway.
But see PZ, the gate agent and many other people don’t share your fear of priests, which is all that counts.
Plus, chances are the priest wouldn’t even be *brown*. /s
@F.O.:
“That priest looks just like the priest who molested me. I mean, it’s not him, but he looks just like him. I can’t fly with that guy, no way!”
I’m not actually advocating the tactic, of course, but you’re missing the truth here. It’s not that people don’t fear priests – it’s that they fear very different things from priests. If you want to make it clear that the airlines are stereotyping and profiling, accusing the priest of a threat that goes against the stereotype won’t do.
Again, I wouldn’t do it, and PZ said he wouldn’t do it, but there are stereotypes that can be raised against priests, and if done in a way that isn’t hurtful to someone (say, a tactful letter asking if the airline’s policy would allow someone molested by priests to have a priest removed from the plane), invoking those stereotypes can be helpful in getting the company to see how fucked up their actions are.
I have no problem with somebody saying they won’t fly with Muslims. Then, on any flight with Muslims, they are either not allowed to board to plane, or if boarded, THEY are escorted off and have to take the next flight with penalty fees….
Let the person who is afraid to fly … not fly.
How did the complainer know they were speaking Arabic?
I’m not sure I’d immediately recognise Arabic.
Depends: if you’re much richer than the guy you’re bullshitting about, there’s a descent probability that many people will pander to your whims.
Sounds like Hebrew, as both are Semitic languages. The Jews and Arabs understand each others radio broadcasts….
PZ; ” I have no interest in competing in the idiocy race with bigots”
Perhaps we should. If enough people make enough ridiculous claims the airlines will see it for what it is. Fucking Bullshit.
Nerd of Redhead #7
No, not really. Not anymore than an English speaker could understand German and vice-versa. Probably even less so.
The grammar of the languages is very similar, there are many shared roots and loanwords, but otherwise neither would understand each other. And that’s Literary Arabic, in Spoken Arabic you wouldn’t even know what letter is being pronounced unless you’re familiar with the specific dialect.
Forgot to give an example of the scale of differences within Arabic, let alone between two different languages.
Not what the Egyptian and Israeli told me in the past.
He went to the Sam Harris School of Terrorist Detection
Chigau #5- they were brown, so anything they were speaking would have been declared as Arabic.
screechymonkey #12
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.
also what NitricAcid said
Hebrew and Arabic are really close. The linguistic distance between English and German is certainly greater than that between Hebrew and Arabic. For those who know either: it is probably better comparable to the distance between German and Dutch.
Shalom aleikhem = Assalaam alaykum
Nerd of Redhead #10
That was true like, 50 years or so ago. When the Muslim countries expelled their Jews, the Jews immigrated mostly to Israel and could very well understand the language of their home country. Not only that, but they spoke a now nearly extinct dialect called Judeo-Arabic, so even when they were speaking their version of Hebrew, Arab listeners could understand it.
That dialect was almost utterly purged by Israel’s “melting pot” policies designed to establish one and only one Zionist-Jewish culture. I haven’t met anyone under 60 who could still speak this dialect.
Furthermore, Egypt has a Hebrew speaking radio station which was listened to in Israel until the signing of the peace agreements (mostly to find out what the enemy was thinking) and Egyptians used to listen to Israel’s second (I think, could have been third) radio station that had a weekly performance of the Sephardi orchestra, which was mainly composed of Egyptian Jews, some of whom had even worked with Umm Khultum. Those people are long dead now and your info is several decades out of date.
Anyone can still catch each others’ radio waves, of course. There is a particular Jordanian station that a some people are fond of, but it’s only playing classical pop and rock songs – and is directed towards English speaking nationals living in the region.
Olav #16
Right. Now compare “I don’t speak Arabic”:
(Hebrew) ani lo medaber/dover aravit – (Arabic) ana la atakalamu arabi
A very short sentence that shows the problem – you have the same grammatical structure, similar simple words (ani/ana means I, lo/la means no), but completely different verbs. Now consider what happens with phrases that have more verbs and no universal nouns like Arabic – it becomes completely incomprehensible.
The 70’s is that much in the past? They said it was like New England Yankee versus Southern drawl.
Nerd of Redhead #19
Sorry Nerd, but they are :(
The children of those immigrants didn’t learn any Arabic due to cultural and political issues, there was a large influx of immigrants from former USSR and there is an ongoing process of Americanization of the Hebrew language (i.e. English words gaining local grammatical structure). The languages are constantly drifting apart to the point that even Israeli Palestinians make fun of the poor Arabic of the Israeli secret service – people whose job relies on knowing Arabic.
Well, I’m afraid to fly on a plane where the pilots are Rapture-ready Christians.
Olav @16:
Yeah, and
Good Morning = Guten Morgen
And Latvian and Lithuanian are certainly closer to each other than English and German. See;
Labrīt = Labas rytas
rq can speak to this better than I can, but I don’t think Latvians and Lithuanians chat easily with each other, despite living next to each other for thousands of years.
Heck, I’m in New Zealand right now and last night the really nice owner of the motel we were at asked me if I wanted “another password for the Internet” and even though I asked her to repeat it, after three times I had no idea at all what she’d said. It wasn’t until she then said the word device, asking if my wife wanted to use an additional device, that I cottoned on.
And I’m pretty sure they speak English here.
hmmm
It looks like I may have started the derail.
*ahem*
Did y’all hear that there were these two guys who were almost refused boarding on their flight because of racist stupidity?
chigau @24: Since the demise of Thunderdome, there’s no such thing as a derail, IMO, until PZ says STFU.
@23: The actors in the great 1969 movie Kes all speak in an authentic north-eastern English accent. It was released in south England with sub-titles, at first, and they’re available for the DVD. It was screened for American executives who literally couldn’t understand a word, and thought this might be a hindrance commercially. The written language is fairly comprehensible worldwide, among native English speakers, but the spoken can be wonderfully incomprehensible.
petesh @26: Well, if you consider Barnsley authentic ;-).
See also Gregory’s Girl.
I also remember seeing a subtitled version.
Rob Grigjanis #25
huh
you could be right
oh well what the hell
.
I saw The Gods Must Be Crazy in a theatre, and had no trouble with the South African english.
Much later, I bought a DVD that was released for a USA audience.
Not only was the speach of the little brown people dubbed, so was the english speaking of ALL the white™ people and coloured™ people.
It was strange.
Actually, this idea sounds terrific. I’m particularly excited by the idea put forth by Trump that it’s okay for a president to force religious groups to shut down. I really, really want to see where they go with that one.
Why stop at priest? I can’t fly with that young white guy because he may shoot up the plane like that young white guy who shot up the school, or theater, or…
Seriously.
PZ
Is there any way you can change
to
?
They may have claimed it was the speaking of Arabic, but I know it was because of the Philadelphia accent. They weren’t anti-Arab. They were Anti-Rocky and anti-hoagie. Probably thought “subs” was the right word, or worse, “hero”. I have no time for people who are anti-scrapple.
@Rob, #22:
You don’t require fluency to merely recognize the language, however. I realize you didn’t shift the bar, others did by claiming that Hebrew speakers and Arabic speakers listen to each others’ radio broadcasts (which is likely true, but that doesn’t mean all do it, or that those that do do it will manage it successfully without practice or some time to pick up the ear for it). But it’s bit silly to think that has any bearing on the original question of mere recognition.
According to wikipedia there are a number of modern semitic languages, but the most common by far is Arabic, and others mentioned are predominantly Arabic influenced and often others are grouped by names such as “South Arabian languages”.
Thus, I’d recognize Hebrew (of course) and would likely assume that another semitic language was Arabic, and by demographics, I’d be very likely to be correct. But it’s true I wouldn’t necessarily “know” it was Arabic. OTOH, those languages that drifted too far from Arabic? Like new-Aramaic languages that are structurally heavily influenced by Akkadian (and have many Akkadian loan words)? I’ve never knowingly heard it spoken, but from the description I could probably say “that’s not Arabic” if I heard enough of it. All the other semitic languages would likely to be dumped (inappropriately) into an “Arabic – or close enough” bin by my brain.
Of course, I’m sufficiently aware of my own limitations that I’d be willing to say, “They might be speaking Arabic” or “I think they’re speaking Arabic”, but I don’t think I’d say “They are speaking Arabic”.
I really don’t know why I’m yammering on about this. Ah, well. Point is, even without fluency, one can have enough of an ear to make a good guess at a language.
From the land of the free and the home of the brave:
…a passenger was afraid to fly with them after overhearing the men speaking Arabic
Why were they refused service, rather than getting the paranoid guy off the plane? I mean, two people inconvenienced is worse than one. And the paranoid guy had no grounds at all for anything – they had been through airport security, and they were not hiding their ability to speak Arabic. Seriously, the airport staff could have laughed at the guy, chucked him off the plane as dangerously deranged, and not refunded his ticket. But no, prejudice trumps all.
I was once watching a small airplane loading up at a smaller airport. It was small enough that it only had one wheel on the landing gear leg closest to the window we were looking at it from. The tyre on that wheel was obviously under-inflated, but everyone kept walking past and around it. I’m not much of a pilot, but I’d not take off with a tyre like that. I kept expecting someone to notice it, but no-one did. So I spoke to the agent at the gate, and was promptly poo-pooed. I pointed out that the tyre on the other side was round and full, and this one was flat and wrinkly. Again I was dismissed. I couldn’t think of what else to do without making a scene, and maybe the pilot had seen it in the pre-flight, and maybe it was acceptable. The plane got off okay, and landed safely, but I still felt bad. I should have told the agent that the tyre looked Arabic.
Afraid of exploding cooties, perhaps….
Czech and Slovak are very similar languages, even more so than German and Dutch. Yet since dissolution of Czechoslovakia young Czech generation grew up without contact with Slovak language and they do not understand it anymore and are unable to speak it. Slovak youngsters have plenty of contact with Czech (on the internet) therefore are much better equipped to understand and even speak it, albeit with heavy accent.
I understand and speak fluent German, yet some German dialects sound completely strange to me – I was unable to understand one colleague and even after two years working together he had to repeat each sentence twice to me. Variations within language can be huge.
However I recognise French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch and Flemish by sound despite not understanding any of those (well, I can understand tiny bits of written text).
So to me it sounds perfectly plausibe, that someone can approximately, with comparatively high confidence (higher than chance) identify by sound language they can neither speak nor understand. And I presume there is enought of arabic language to be heard in american TV in last years for at least some people to get the gist of its tone and diction.
Of course the whole affair is ridiculous, and it is just one of many symptoms of much bigger problem. This mentality is exactly what ISIL and Al-Quaida intended to instill in westerners. They thrive on “us versus them” mentality.
When I was fifteen years ago in US, I once hyperbolicaly claimed that US republicans are fascists and that Osama bin Ladin has won, because Americans give up their freedoms vilingly. Now that seems even more close to truth and less of a hyperbole and fascism rears its ugly head in EU as well. And fascism needs an idetifiable enemy for it to thrive. It used to be greedy-hook-nosed-Jew, now it is violent-hook-nosed-Arab. The differences are only cosmetic.
Traveling with a priest would make me very uncomfortable and if I were to sit beside one, I might ask to be relocated if possible. Because should that parasite try to strike up a conversation, I would not mind offending his sensibilities by telling him exactly what I think about his orgainsation and the bullshit he peddles. But I would have to be prepared in such a case to have to bear the consequences of disturbing the order of the things, and I certainly would not expect to halt the whole flight and for the personell go out of their way to cater to my particular distaste of members of legalized mafia.
I consider THIS the bright side:
If the airline was so concerned about safety, etc, then at that point they should’ve kicked the “complainer” off for being a nuisance and endangering operations.
If it is in their power, the fix for this problem is making the FAA issue rules that a passenger may not be removed from a plane for simply speaking a non-English language and/or wearing clothing with non-English words on them.
The only time I had any great fear of flying was one time in Poland – I think it was Rzeszow – where there were orthodox Jewish priests performing some kind of ritual with swinging censers, chanting etc in the departure lounge. I couldn’t help wondering whether they knew something about the flight that I didn’t, and it really freaked me out. By contrast, on a Royal Brunei flight I found the Muslim prayer before takeoff sensitive and quite moving.
Crip Dyke #33
Considering how much middle-Aramaic went into Hebrew and the Gemara in particular, you’d probably even know enough to recognize them as Aramaic variants out-right.
(Not that I would know – I’ve never heard those languages)
Does the priest look like Sam Harris or is the priest Jerry Seinfeld? Because if the priest is Jerry Seinfeld, there’s no way they’d get hassled.
I’m from the south of England; I have a friend from the North; we’ve both lived in the Midlands for years. We both speak mutually comprehensible English and mostly communicate just fine with each other. Yet, once in a while, we’ll emit a sentence that the other finds completely unintelligible. And, of course, when we’re asked to repeat it, we’ll say it again in exactly the same way, and — of course — it still sounds like gibberish. After a few rounds of this, either light dawns (“Ah, the government! Right, gotcha.”) or we do the thing where the puzzled one says something non-commital, hoping that the other will say something more illuminating or just move the conversation along.
Vole, that doesn’t sound like Orthodox Jews at all. Censers aren’t used in Judaism for anything.
If you meant some form of Eastern Orthodox Christian, that would make more sense. And also be more reasonable for calling them “Priests” since Judaism hasn’t had priests since the destruction of the Second Temple.
As a few people have noted, the person who is afraid should be the one who gets bumped — but it isn’t the case. A long time ago I was the person who was kicked off. My then partner and I went on a trip to New Orleans, where we had a loud verbal disagreement and broke up. Obviously, we were booked on the same flight home. She apparently told someone she was afraid to fly on the same plane as me, because after boarding, four air marshals came on board to escort me off the plane.
No compensation, and it was the last flight of the day.
The person who is afraid should be given the choice, overcome your fear or take a later flight,.
@43 As an atheist I don’t know about these things, so you’re probably right. But it was disturbing.
@#43, karpad
Right, right. And Presbyterians don’t have priests either, they have Presbyters. And the Pope isn’t a priest, he’s a Pope. Jews don’t have priests, they have men who study their holy texts, lead them in religious rituals, and offer opinions on moral and ethical questions — obviously totally different from “priests”. Nobody could possibly use the word “priest” as a general category to indicate religious leaders in general.
If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but it’s Jewish, then obviously we need a new word, because the Jews haven’t had “ducks” for centuries.
Left that area (Phila) some time ago, but often visit relatives.
This is where I heard the general blue collar population give the cheer which I can characterize in a specific comment I heard “They finally got that n****r!” on the night MLK was murdered.
I’ve moved to a 50/50 white/other area and have found such blatant, continual racism far less prevalent, even in the blue collar community I work within. SE PA is also the area I’ve heard any number of languages spoken, from all manners of Pa Dutch dialects to Polish to Spanish, and it amazingly was the “Rican” only that I heard the complaints about, supposing them not to be ‘from round here’ I guess as the excuse.
Their problem was flying INTO Phila.
Rob Grigjanis @22
Recognize Lithuanian? Sure. Understand it? No. Get a general gist? Only if it’s written. And vice versa. Plus I can’t guarantee my unequivocal understanding of all the individual Latvian dialects as is (see: Ventiš vs. Latgallian, for one).
That being said, I’d have far more issues separating Estonian, Finnish and Liv speakers (better than 50-50 for Finn vs. Eesti, but no bets on Eesti vs. Liv).
+++
In this case, there is only one person who should not have been let on that place: the person afraid of potential Arabic. If s/he’s flying while scared and paranoid, s/he poses a greater danger to the other passengers, as who knows how he might react to the slightest provocation while high on all that fear-adrenaline?
The problem could easily have been solved by confiscating the brown men’s nail clippers and letting them board.