the ANGRY MINUTE is heard Tuesday Nights on WCCO-AM 830 Dark Star. .... .... Bush. the idiot. George W. Bush, appropriation, experimental, turntablism,
[11-28-06]
I wanted to let it pass, but now this.
Yesterday, outraged Muslims staged a Pray-In at Reagan Washington National Airport, demanding an apology for the (6) clerics removed from a US Airways flight just (5) days earlier, for a makeshift prayer session at a Minneapolis St Paul Airport terminal.
The imams who were returning from a prayer conference alarmed fellow passengers by their display prompting airport officials to remove them from the flight.
The clerics contend it was following their religious practice, which often calls for impromptu prayer.
Now while the law is on their side, and racial profiling has proven ineffective and biased, isn’t this more about tolerance? I can’t help wonder if it were a Buddhist bellowing or contrite Christian robotically reciting an Our Father, whether said passengers would be as unnerved. That’s what a rosary is for. That’s why beads aren’t made of sleigh bells. Because it’s personal. And should be.
This is not about denying someone their right to pray, it’s about not yelling “Fire!” in a theatre when someone flicks a Bic.
When I go to Germany, I don’t ask why I can’t Goose Step around the gardens of Stuttgart, or why I don’t yell White Power! in Compton.
It’s called tolerance, and it’s the First Chapter in Anybody’s Bible.
You know it’s not a crime to pray before you board a plane, but in a country where impotence is legal grounds for divorce in 24 states, and Florida feels the legal need to forbid sex with a porcupine, maybe the law has nothing to do with this.
Somehow it seems to me that if Allah doesn’t mind you exploiting his name for a public demonstration, he might not mind a little less conspicuousness, if only in the name of foreign etiquette.
