Imam incident rests on a raw nerve

Like many other air travelers, the couple from Rochester agonized over whether authorities properly removed six Muslim imams Monday from a US Airways flight in the Twin Cities after their preflight prayers and other activities led a nervous passenger to write a note to a flight attendant.

And like many others, the couple disagreed.

"I would have noticed those men, and I might even have been a little uncomfortable," said Ashley Parish, 17, waiting for a flight to North Carolina to meet her boyfriend's family. "But I wouldn't have complained about it. ... They were praying, and I know Muslims do that."

But her boyfriend, Vuoa Her, 19, a student at Rochester Community and Technical College, thinks he might have reacted differently.

"You don't fool around with that kind of thing. I think it's bad that this happened, religious guys getting stopped for being religious," he said. "But times are different. If you get a bad feeling about something in an airport or on a plane, I think you should say something.

"It's better to make a mistake and insult people than make a mistake and let a planeload of people get killed."

The incident set off a nationwide debate. Bloggers and talk radio hosts held forth on the need to be vigilant. Civil rights advocates and Muslim leaders saw the incident as racial profiling or discrimination.

The six were to fly home from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport on Monday after a conference when they were removed from the US Airways flight. They were questioned for five hours and released, returning to Arizona on Tuesday on Northwest Airlines after US Airways refused to sell them tickets. Details of the incident remain in dispute, and the airline and officials are investigating.

Choosing how to react

At the airport, the events still weighed on the mind of many travelers; many pondered what they would have done.

Amy Diem, 30, heard about the incident before she left Ann Arbor, Mich., to visit her uncle in Minnesota "and I was shocked that something like this happened. I'd like to think that I'd react differently than that passenger did."

Many Muslims at the airport Wednesday seemed reluctant to discuss the matter. But Ahmed Munir, 37, of Minneapolis, paused to talk as he helped two Somali immigrants buy tickets for a US Airways flight to Philadelphia.

"I am very angry that Muslim holy men were taken off the plane. It was very disrespectful," he said. "However, I also am a little bit not happy with those men. We all know we have to be a little more careful how we act in airports -- everybody, Muslims, too.

"So I wish they would have been a little bit more quiet."

At the heart of many travelers' unease were questions about whether their personal reactions indicated they harbored prejudice against people from the Middle East.

"Would I have been nervous [about the reported conversation of the imams]? Yeah, probably. And I probably would have reported it to somebody," said Tom Boggs, 50, of Inver Grove Heights, waiting Wednesday to board a flight to Phoenix. "I don't think I'm prejudiced. I'd like to think that I'd report any situation that seemed strange or unusual, no matter who it involved."

Many travelers agreed on one point: The pilot "probably was right" to eject the six men.

"This is a really sad situation, but what could the pilot do?" wondered former Minnesotan Marilyn Sherman, 61, arriving from Wellington, Fla., to visit her brother in Shoreview.

"I think the passenger overreacted -- can't you pray anymore in public? Can't you talk politics, even in an airport? But the pilot couldn't know for sure what was going on," she said. "All he had was a note from an upset passenger.

"The pilot probably was right to not take a chance, get the men off the plane and let security people sort it out," Sherman said. "But this whole thing shouldn't have happened."

"If I were a terrorist ..."

English traveler Harriet Lowe, 43, of London, wondered if the situation might have been defused if airline officials had questioned the men before they were on the plane.

"They could have just said in a low-key way, 'Look, some passengers are upset. We'd just like to talk with you for a minute.' And once it became apparent who these men were, the whole thing might have gone away," Lowe said.

"But I'm feeling pretty conflicted about this," she continued. "On the one hand, I wish these [Muslim] men had acted differently, expressed their religiosity in a way that didn't make others so nervous. But I detest the idea of pouncing on someone for praying too loudly, and, quite frankly, if I were a terrorist, I would have worked mightily to appear insignificant.

"They weren't acting much like terrorists, to my mind."

Warren Wolfe • 612-673-7253 • wolfe@startribune.com