When President Barack Obama announced to the public that U.S. troops had killed Osama bin Laden, he was careful to say that the nation was not at war with Islam. It was an important message that echoed similar statements in recent years from other high-ranking U.S. officials. Sad to say, not everyone got the message.
There’s no other explanation for the recent treatment of four members of the Muslim clergy. The imams – two from Memphis and two from New York – were either barred or removed from domestic U.S. airline flights. The only apparent reasons for such treatment were the appearance and perhaps the names of the religious leaders. That type of discrimination shows America at its worst.
Each of the four clergyman, ironically, was attempting to travel to Charlotte, N.C., for a conference on Islamophobia, or the fear of Islam. The incidents should give those who smugly assume that the United States is far too progressive to need that sort of conference reason to reconsider the opinion.
The imams from Memphis were taken off an Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight. American Airlines removed one imam from the New York-Charlotte flight and denied the other a seat – twice. The airlines’ reasoning defies reasoning.
According to one of the Memphis imams, a professor at the University of Memphis, the ASA pilot said other passengers aboard might feel uncomfortable with them on board. That’s of no consequence, assuming the clergymen had passed the same security tests as other passengers.