According to a recent federal complaint, Alaska Airlines illegally removed two Black Muslim men off one of its flights in Washington state after a fellow customer complained about one of the men sending an Arabic text message.
According to the complaint, Abobakkr Dirar and Mohamed Elamin boarded a flight in Seattle bound for San Francisco in February 2020. Dirar exchanged text messages and emoticons to a buddy who wasn’t on the aircraft just before departure. Another passenger, who couldn’t read or understand Arabic, saw the text messages and reported to an Alaska Airlines flight crew member, according to Dirar and Elamin’s attorneys.
According to the complaint, which was filed on August 2, the anonymous passenger who reported the guys instantly rose up, grabbed his luggage, and fled the aircraft. After an Alaska Airlines management deplaned Dirar and Elamin, the men were subjected to further security checks and were barred from boarding a plane together on a re-booked journey. According to the complaint, airport security agents also grabbed Dirar’s smartphone.
“Alaska Airlines’ discrimination against these men not only disrupted their business trip, but also caused them serious long-term emotional distress and immense pressure to avoid the attention of others and conduct themselves in ways that conceal their ethnic and religious identities when flying,” attorneys said in a statement.
Alaska Airlines said it takes discrimination seriously but won’t comment more since the matter is still being litigated. The corporation in Seattle is being sued for discrimination under state and federal civil rights laws.
“Our biggest obligation is to ensuring that our flight operations are safe every day,” the airlines stated in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch. “This includes complying with federal rules on evaluating any passenger safety issues.”
According to the complaint, Dirar and Elamin are bearded males who were born in Sudan but are now US citizens. According to the complaint, the buddies were on their way to San Francisco to buy automobiles that they planned to drive back north to Washington state. According to the complaint, once airport police confiscated Dirar’s phone, officials found the text messages he had been sending were innocuous.
In a statement, Dirar said that he is suing in the hopes that Alaska Airlines would never mistreat another Muslim American again.
“I will see this through to the finish because I want the airlines to stop doing this to anybody,” he stated. “When we were traveling that day, we were not treated the same as other people, which made me feel unequal to other people.”
According to Dirar and Elamin’s attorneys, the event is rooted in the Islamophobia that exists in the United States two decades after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Muslim Americans believe they continue to experience hostility 20 years after 9/11, although hate crimes against them, such as mosque burnings and other violence, are no longer front and center.
According to the most current government statistics available, the number of anti-Muslim hate crimes recorded to the FBI increased from 107 in 2009 to 176 in 2019. A 51-year-old man was arrested and charged with the murder of two Muslim men in Albuquerque on Tuesday.