Ejected for wearing “Suspected Terrorist” button

July 20, 2003 pollas

John Gilmore: I was ejected from a plane for wear­ing “Sus­pected Ter­ror­ist” but­ton [via Boing­Bo­ing].

Sud­denly a flight stew­ard, Cabin Ser­vice
Direc­tor Khaleel Miyan, loomed in front of me and demanded that I
remove a small 1″ but­ton pinned to my left lapel. I declined, say­ing
that it was a polit­i­cal state­ment and that he had no right to cen­sor
pas­sen­gers’ polit­i­cal speech. The but­ton, which was cre­ated by
polit­i­cal activist Emi Koyama, says “Sus­pected Terrorist”.

(…)

The stew­ard returned with Capt. Peter Hughes. The cap­tain requested,
and then demanded, that I remove the but­ton (they called it a “badge”). He said that I would endan­ger the air­craft and com­mit a fed­eral crime if I did not take it off. I told him that it was a polit­i­cal state­ment and declined to remove it.

They turned the plane around and brought it back to the gate, delay­ing 300 pas­sen­gers on a full flight.

(…)

I asked whether I would be per­mit­ted to fly if I wore other but­tons,
per­haps one say­ing “Hooray for Tony Blair”. She said she thought that
would be OK. I said, how about “Ter­ror­ism is Evil”. She said that I
prob­a­bly wouldn’t get on. I started to dis­cuss other pos­si­ble but­tons, like “Oppose Ter­ror­ism”, try­ing to fig­ure out what kinds of polit­i­cal speech I would be per­mit­ted to express in a BA plane, but she said that we could stand there mak­ing hypo­thet­i­cals all night and she wasn’t inter­ested. Ulti­mately, I was refused pas­sage because I would not cen­sor myself at her command.

Why am I not sur­prised… It’s hard to add any­thing, guess it speaks for itself. But I’m hav­ing great trou­ble accept­ing this whole “we’re so damn scared of some­thing we can’t really fig­ure out what is, so if we just behave like crazy cow­boys and for­get about basic human rights, going for zero tol­er­ance towards those eggheads try­ing to add just a lit­tle bit of thought to it all, we’ll be ok”-thing. Damn, peo­ple act­ing aggres­sively based on fear don’t do it for me.

Reminded me of a story with a guy try­ing to order cus­tom made Nike-shoes with the word “Sweat­shop” writ­ten on them. Guess if he succeeded.

Misc.. URL.

2 Responses to Ejected for wearing “Suspected Terrorist” button

  1. JLP says:
    August 1, 2003 at 2:25 am

    This guy is an idiot. Is he com­pletely out of his mind? Any senseable human can hear the record­ings in the ter­mi­nals that state any jokes or remarks con­cer­ing threats to safety will be taken seri­ously. Does he think that is being played over and over for our enjoy­ing plea­sure?
    We, as the pub­lic have a right to safety. That is no joke. If he wants to get along in socioety, he needs to respect the secu­rity of oth­ers. His pin may not be offen­sive to him, but it would be to me. Being an air­line cap­tain myself, I too would have him removed. I would think him an inde­screte fool for war­ing the pin to begin with.
    What else is the nut capa­ble of?

  2. Anders says:
    August 1, 2003 at 12:29 pm

    I’m cool with peo­ple pay­ing more atten­tion to safety after 9–11 — every­thing else would be stu­pid. In case of another ter­ror­ist attack, I would of course feel bad if com­plaints of the increase in check-in time due to the added con­trol had caused the pos­si­bil­ity of, say, car­ry­ing a bomb onto a plane. But ask your­self: Would you really feel scared if trav­el­ling with a guy car­ry­ing a badge say­ing ‘sus­pected ter­ror­ist’. No you wouldn’t. But you would appa­rantly feel provoced, which just isn’t rea­son enough to pull the guy off. I’m hav­ing great dffi­cul­ties accept­ing this whole “you’re either with us or against us”-thing. First of all, fear-based stu­pid­ity (he’s not really going to carry a bomb and put a “I’m the bomber”-sticker on his shirt, now is he) wrapped in “Oh, so you’re tak­ing the lib­erty to ques­tion parts of the way this terrorism-thing is han­dled — so you’re play­ing on their team?!” reminds me all too much of good old McCarthy. And going “if he can be indis­crete, what else can he do” is just plain daft. I thought we were fight­ing for free­dom here — not for the right to judge peo­ple based on (irra­tional) sus­pi­sion. And if you want to jus­tify a war, a way to han­dle ter­ror­ism etc. you might want to allow for just a lit­tle dis­cus­sion on the sub­ject, every­thing else is actu­ally a lit­tle sus­pi­cious, and effec­tively cut off all crit­i­cal voice by being bru­tal is very sim­i­lar to the way ‘the enemy’ is run­ning their own coun­tries. News­flash: All peo­ple capa­ble of voic­ing a more com­plex opin­ion than the black-or-white ver­sion aren’t ter­ror­ists, doesn’t sup­port Sad­dam or Osama — they might just be doing their bit to secure an open dis­cus­sion and a free democ­racy which is kind of nice to have when we’re forc­ing our way of liv­ing onto other countries…