Arabic Profiling: Right or Wrong?

by TRMarchesano

A recent AP story detailed the events surrounding a lawsuit brought on American Airlines by six Iraqi men.  They were returning from Camp Pendleton where they were training Marines on Iraqi culture prior to deployment to the region.  The six men, David Al-Watan, Talal Cholagh, Ali Alzerej, Hassan Alzerej, Hussein Alsalih and Mohammad Al-Saedy, were overheard speaking in Arabic by a fellow passenger onboard the airplane.  This was enough to cause nerves to jitter and the plane returned to the terminal where the six men were detained and made to feel like criminals based on their language and race.  In essence, they were racially profiled.

A few years back I took some downtime at CENTCOM in Qatar.  In the four months I was there I became acquainted with an Iraqi gentlemen from the Chicago area.  Both of us being smokers we would often see each other behind the building and chat.  I didn’t even know his nationality until about a month or so into our “smoke breaks”.   He had no accent and appeared Italian or Greek for all I knew.  Apparently he was a part of a group of Iraqi’s who had left the country years earlier due to threats by the Hussein regime and were now extremely important translators.  They were serving their country, the United States.  Patriots.

On the flip side though, had I been a passenger on the aforementioned flight, I too would have trained my peripherals on passengers speaking Arabic.  It’s just the way things are these days.  If it were Danish people hijacking planes and running them into buildings they would get the same wary eye.

If anyone has any input or thoughts on this I would like to hear them.  Should non-Arabs not be so quick to react to Arabs/Muslims?  Especially on airplanes?  Or should the Arab/Muslims thicken their skin and realize, its nothing personal, that’s just the way it is these days.  A portion of the middle eastern population has cast an extremely negative light on Arab/Muslims, and they have them, and only them, to blame for it.

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