TSA Targets Women Wearing Hijabs?
Nadia Hassan is a frequent flyer. The forty-year-old MBA, who was born in Michigan, had never been hassled until Tuesday morning, January 5.
She was traveling with her five-year-old daughter and went to Dulles International to board a plane for Los Angeles.
She was in line to go through security.
“Before I could even get to the conveyor belt,” she says, “a lady in uniform comes up to me and asks me to remove my headscarf. I said, ‘No, I cannot, but you’re more than welcome to pat me down or search me.’ ”
The TSA agent stood there while she put her belt, shoes, coat, and laptop in the bins and went through the usual screening device with her daughter.
“But as soon as we went through the screening, she said, ‘Ma’am, can you come to the side for a full body pat-down?’ She did it right in front of four men, and she was touching me everywhere. And every article in my baggage was being checked for bomb-making materials.”
Hassan says she asked the man who was examining her bags what was going on.
“Ma’am, they just switched procedures on us this morning,” she remembers him saying. “Every woman wearing a head scarf must go through this type of search.”
The TSA denies this new policy, sort of.
“The Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) current procedures for the screening of bulky clothing or headwear -- which have been in effect since 2007 -- remain unchanged,” it said in a statement. “The wearing of a hijab itself does not automatically trigger security checks. To ensure the highest level of security, passengers wearing loose fitting or bulky clothing -- including headwear -- may be subject to additional screening. In instances where passengers choose not to remove bulky clothing, including headwear, our officers are trained to offer a private screening area and may conduct a pat down search to clear the individual.”
Hassan calls the “additional screening” of women wearing hijabs “villainization.”
“I was born and raised in this country,” she says. “My father was a Marine and fought in the Korean War. We were taught to love this country. You’re targeting good Americans who just want to practice their faith and dress modestly.”
Hassan understands the need for “safeguarding Americans, myself included,” she says.
“But that morning I didn’t feel I was safeguarded or protected. I felt like I was being insulted. I felt like I was being targeted.”
In a separate incident on January 4, a Muslim woman with a Canadian passport was trying to fly from the airport in Halifax to Ohio to visit her husband. She believes she was held for questioning because she was the only woman wearing a head scarf, the Council on American Islamic Relations reports.
Nihad Awad, head of the group, objects to the policy of profiling women who wear headscarves. “Screening of passengers,” Awad said, should be based on an analysis of “people’s suspicious behaviors, not on their skin color or religious attire.”
Matthew Rothschild is the editor of The Progressive magazine. To subscribe for just $14.97 a year, just click here.
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Comments
Supreme Court Justice Jackson, was an Ass.
As might be anyone, wandering around regurgitating this putrid rhetoric.
By the way, Justice Robert Jackson, didn't even graduate from Law School.
But what he said was -----"The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact."
He said this in his dissent of the Vinson Court's ruling in the Terminiello case, in which I agree with the majority's ruling, however much I might loathe, whatever speech that Catholic Priest, Terminiello, might have used that day.
Either way, Jackson was just a New Deal Court appointee, put there to ram thru whatever his masters requested.
As one might suspect, this was a time of Internment Camps.
After FDR died, he began trying to be his own man,
sensing that danger, Truman packed him off to head up the Nuremberg Trials.
William H. Rehnquist, alluded to the fact that, although Jackson concurred with the majority in Brown vs. Board of Education, he was actually in favor of the Separate but Equal policy in question.
A better, less sinister quotation, you might find useful in your noxious arguments, might be one of the roots to this line of thinking, where Jefferson said, as he was trying to weasel out of his sure knowledge, that the Louisiana Purchase had no Constitutional Authority ----
"a strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."
But, I am sure Jefferson is looking down at you guys
and kicking himself in the ass over this, right now,
wondering if he might have come up with less dangerous arguments, in support of the "Real Estate Deal of a Lifetime", that he also knew, he would be vilified for, had he not taken it.
If he reads this site, he now realizes that he is to be vilified, no matter.
Then you would follow this line of thinking into Lincoln, but it becomes more sinister , and much more of a reach, should you even quote him, along these lines.
But, who really firmed up this Abomination, was Judge
Richard Allen Posner, in some of his rantings.
Along with his opposing the concept of "Right to Privacy", and his and Bork's destruction of Anti- trust legislation --- how's that working out for us, guys?
Posner is your typical NeoCon --- Communist Upbringing, later becoming influenced by the "Chicago School" and then, "Presto" --- another NeoCon, blathering about "the Bill of Rights not being a Suicide Pact".
Trotsky is looking down, loving it tho.
The severity of my tone, is only a response to your own snottiness.
So let me add, that before you hang the Shingle, "Constitutional Scholar" on your door ----
You need to learn how to, "Piss in the tall grass with the bigger dogs".
I'd add the word, "Boy", to the end of that addition,
but that might seem a bit, "over the top".
But I am so sick of hearing that "Quote", however misquoted, wrongly attributed, and simplistically condensed, used to justify the demolishing of all the principles that made the US great, and the envy of all nations.
Here's one, for you to practice your sophistry on --
It's called the 9th amendment and it goes like this--
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people".
Weasel on that one.