Photo by amrufm/Flickr (Creative Commons)
A cheery group of travelers, the women in Muslim head scarves, or hijab, walks through an airport. April, 2009
Most of the reader comments that have flooded news sites since NPR’s dismissal of news analyst Juan Williams last week, following a remark he made about Muslims during an appearance on Fox’s “The O’Reilly Factor,” have been either about his comment or the network’s decision to fire him.
But some people have taken Williams’ remark – about becoming nervous when he got on a plane and saw people in “Muslim garb” – and provided their own opinions about the profiling of Muslims and others in airports. Some have posted comments about being profiled, others about doing the profiling. Here are a few excerpts from the past few days.
On the KPCC website under an audio clip from Friday’s AirTalk program with Larry Mantle, which aired a segment Friday on the Williams incident, ”Hargobind” posted:
I am so glad this topic is being discussed. I am a Sikh American, wear a turban and have a long beard. For all practical purposes I look like a Muslim, and I understand that knee jerk response. I am one of most randomly screened people in the airport, and I kind of understand it why.
I am not just hoping that people will one day understand that 99% of people wearing a turban in U.S. are not Muslims but Sikhs, but also that people who are wearing a so called Muslim garb are not choosing to define themselves as Muslims first over being American. So far I have not yet found an American garb, if there is one please do tell.
Under NPR’s initial story about the dismissal (which has received more than 8,000 comments), a reader identified as Millini Skuba wrote:
I, too, am nervous around Muslims on planes, but I’m nervous around teens of any color when I’m alone in a parking lot at night. That doesn’t mean I’m racist or prejudiced.
