On a Monday evening in late November of 2006, six Muslims imams returning home to Phoenix from a religious conference were removed from a US Airways flight about to take off from the Minneapolis airport.  They were led by Omar Shahin, president of the North American Imams Federation, who acted as their spokesman during ensuing press conferences, whining sessions, and lawsuits against US Airways and their fellow passengers.

The names of the six antagonists in this silly incident are Didmar Faja, Mohamed Said Mitwaly Ibrahim, Marwan Sadeddin, Omar Shahin, Ahmad al-Shqeirat, and Mahmoud Sulaiman.  All of them except Ibrahim lived and worked in the Phoenix area.

The imams claimed they were victims of profiling and discrimination and hate merely because they were Muslims who prayed quietly in the airport terminal, but various facts tell a completely different story:

Number one, they didn’t pray quietly and they didn’t pray once.  They prayed loudly in the terminal and then gathered to pray again on the plane.  (Note: Muslim ritual demands one prayer at sundown, not two, and there is a fatwa saying that Muslims don’t have to pray at all while traveling.)

Number two: they didn’t sit in their assigned seats.  Two of them sat up front in first class, two of them sat in the middle of the plane, and two sat in the rear, so they had all three exits covered.  Then they walked back and forth talking loudly in Arabic and English.

Number three: some of them asked for seat belt extensions which the airlines keep available for overweight passengers, even though none of the imams needed such an extension.  Rather than attaching the extensions to their seat belts, they placed them on the floor at their feet where they would presumably be handy as weapons.

Number four: other Muslims on the plane were not removed from the flight, and indeed it was an Arabic-speaking Muslim who wrote a note to a flight attendant warning her of the imams suspicious behavior, and telling her what they had been saying in Arabic... so any claims that the airline was discriminating against Muslims is hogwash.  (Another Arabic speaker verbally warned a flight attendant about what they were saying.)

Number five: the imams repeatedly lied about their own behavior and how they were treated, including saying that they were led off the plane in handcuffs which the police report and eyewitness accounts contradict.

Number six: the imams made the rest of the passengers, including Muslim passengers, so nervous that they stood and applauded after they were removed from the plane.

Clearly this was a manufactured incident, whether for reasons of intelligence gathering for future terrorist attacks or simply to generate lawsuits and give these imams and the American Muslim agenda a chance to exploit their victimhood for political purposes.


Sources:

11/22/06 - New York Times - 6 Imams Removed From Flight for Behavior Deemed Suspicious

11/22/06 - Star Tribune - Uproar follows imams’ detention

11/28/06 - Washington Times - How the imams terrorized an airliner

12/3/06 - Fox News - 6 Imams Kicked Off Plane Gave Crew Several Reasons to Be Suspicious

12/4/06 - Pajamas Media - THE FAKING IMAMS

Wikipedia - Flying imams incident



Posted from Reno, Nevada, USA

August 22, 2012 - i am sorry but i was reading your story about the bogus hate crimes and was wondering where you were getting your information from?  My uncle happens to be Imam Marwan Sadeddin—who was the blind Imam who happens to be very overweight along with one other of the flying Imams.  They prayed in the terminal one time—and not on the plane.  One of the imams that was sitting in first class had offered his seat to my uncle being that he is BLIND—OVERWEIGHT—and an OLDER GENTLEMAN out of respect since the chairs are bigger.  So that answers—seatbelt extenstion, and seating.  BTW—my uncle DID NOT change his seat, but since the plane had been delayed everyone was talking.  There is no fatwa that says Muslims must not pray, there is one that says they can shorten their prayers and combine them at different times.  That covers the fatwa.  You got your information from different anti-muslim sources—why not be a little more open minded before spreading more hatred.  Hate begets hate—Not all muslims are hatefilled anti-everything.  Most of us are law abiding citizens who are busy trying to take care of their families and lives like everyone else.  But every period in history there has been an enemy—the cols war is over—the wall torn down in germany—communism is dead—lets go after another misunderstood group!!  I hope this helps explains some issue and you dont try to turn this into something bad—thank you and wish you the best in your future blogging!!! - Aziza, Belgium

J.P. replies: Your comment is full of nonsense.  Perhaps you are used to people more worried about offending Muslims than seeking the truth.  I don’t fall into that category.  The overweight imam requesting a seatbelt extension was Omar Shahin (the man pictured at the top of this article), not your uncle, and to make the point further, here is a photo of your uncle (in yellow shirt):


Your uncle is clearly not large enough to need an extension, and anyway, if you read the accounts of the incident, the extension was not used but rather placed on the floor.  As for where I get my information, every single one of these bogus hate crimes is followed by a list of online sources documenting the information presented.  To make sure they are still working, I clicked on each of them.  One didn’t work so I removed it.  The six remaining sources tell the whole story.  And it’s important to remember that Omar Shahin is associated with another similar plane incident and various terrorist front groups.  SOURCE.  He apparently enjoys the hullabaloo that comes with feigning victimhood.