PSA: Did You Know Muslims Can’t Fly?

At first we Muslims were avoiding subway trains, because you know, somebody might push us onto the tracks. But now it seems that airplanes aren’t a viable means of transportation for us either because we’re not really allowed to ride them.
Yes, that’s right. We Muslims need to figure out how to get home from college or reach our vacation destinations without boarding an airplane. Perhaps a trackable Muslim-only Jihadi ship will suffice?
If you’ve been keeping up with the news since the Paris attacks, you would know that there has been a frightening increase in anti-Muslim attacks all around the Western world. Refusing to fly with Muslim passengers and then forcing them to exit flights that they paid for has been one of the many tactics used by Islamophobic people as a reflection of their bigotry.
A 30-year-old African-American Muslim woman that wears the hijab, Kameelah Rasheed, tweeted on Nov. 15 as she planned on traveling to Istanbul, Turkey the following week:

 
But the problem was she was going to fly to Istanbul on an airplane. How dare she.
Kameelah was traveling from Newark Liberty International Airport in Newark, N.J. where she was pulled aside for extra questioning by customs officers after having cleared her regular security checks. She told Al Jazeera that she was repeatedly asked questions including:

“Why are you flying? How can you afford to go on holiday? Where are you going in Istanbul?”

They even accused her of booking a one-way ticket despite her showing them evidence of a return ticket on her cellphone.
Airport authorities eventually allowed her to board the plane but they ended up forcibly removing her before take-off for further questioning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They also confiscated her phone and passport.
Kameelah said she was the only visibly Muslim person aboard the airplane. She described the incident that has left her “traumatized and shaken” as an “attempt to humiliate and ostracize” her.

“It’s frustrating to me that I can’t fly like a normal human being.”

At least 12 Muslim passengers, other than Kameelah Rasheed, have been forced to leave aircrafts over the past two weeks due to “security concerns” or “suspicious activity” (which happened to be people speaking in Arabic and watching the news on their phones).
Sorry, but it turns out that a Muslim’s existence as a regular citizen on their way to visit some tourist locations is actually a threat to society.
So unless you want to travel on the trackable Muslim-only Jihadi ship, stop wearing your hijab, stop growing that beard, stop speaking in any language other than American, and while you’re at it, lighten your skin color too. Oh, and for God’s sake, stop using that portable device of yours to find out what’s going on around the world in front of other people. That’s really offensive and scary!
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Written by Khalood Kibria
Image: Twitter