Wonder no more: Judaism is an ethno-religious group, with several distinct regional sub-groups. The subgroups are essentially derived from where in the Diaspora we ended up and interbred with the locals–whether that be Northern Africa, China, India, Middle East, or Europe. However, genetic analysis shows a common heritage between those various Jewish groups, originating in the Levant about 3500-2000 years ago.
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Thanks. Still odd to me to designate “Jewish” as an ethnicity, as many do in common parlance, given that say, members of Ashkenazi and Sephardic groups so often differ in appearance, with one readily achieving whiteness in the U.S., and another not doing so as readily.
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I dunno, my father-in-law is the most legitimate secular humanist I’ve ever met and he does pretty well on JDate, so I’m going with yes.
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Nope. It’s very simple.
It’s not an everyday person’s job to be paranoid and report on anyone who looks different. If you see a gun, if you see a knife, if you see a bomb, if you see a book titled “how to blow up an airplane,” if you overhear “I will detonate it when we reach 5000 feet,” sure, go for it. But civilians aren’t responsible for airline security and they aren’t responsible for terrorism investigations and they aren’t responsible for immigration interviews. And the statistical chances of being on a plane with a would-be terrorist are so slim that if you’re so uninformed as to be worried about that, it means you don’t have the sound judgment to make a good call as to whether someone could be a terrorist or not.
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…and yet .govs the world over are employing these people - who get bombarded 24x7 with “fear, fear, fear, commercial, fear, fear, fear, anxiety” by every media outlet - as front line detection via “see something, say something”.
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I think “amateur” is a pretty accurate characterization of the FAs on a flight like this, which remember was not from a highly respected carrier like Ryan Air or Spirit, but was from a charter flight for a travel agency.
I also don’t think bringing up examples of racism on US carriers is helpful for this discussion. The UK has its own style of anti-Muslim racism, but it is different from ours, informed by the fact that the population of immigrants from the Middle East (and India/Pakistan) is far more visible in the UK than it is in the US. They also have, on a per-capita basis, around 50 times more citizens getting sucked into ISIS than we do.
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So profiling is okay then? I’m confused as to the relevance here. Do you want me to quote racial breakdowns in crime stats to explain why “driving while black” is an okay phenomenon?
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That’s because the Jewish ethnicity and our rules regarding our ethnic identification predate modern conceptions of race, especially the US-centric Critical Race Theory conceptions of White/POC categorization. That particular arrangement of White/POC is dependent on how others perceive and define us according to their own preconceptions, not in how we classify ourselves.
[sarcasm] We apologize for the failure to conform to your US-centric expectations regarding how we identify ourselves, but we’ve been at this for a couple of millennia, and we’ll probably still be doing it this way when the big question moves from melanin count to gene-tweak level [/sarcasm].
As odd as it may seem to someone who views everything in that White/POC dichotomy, I am almost certainly more closely related to the Kaifeng Jews, the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jews), and the Sephardi than I am to you. This is despite me being someone that you would count as “white” in US viewpoints, as I am fairly classic Ashkenazi (and with the admitted assumption that you’re a White American of European ancestry with no hidden Ashkenazi or Sephardi ancestry).
Because of that Jewish heritage, as much as you might insist that I am “white” according to your literally skin-deep classifications, I still get routine death threats from White Supremacists with explicit details on how they intend on murdering me for the crime of being Not White. And I only have conditional, limited access to white privilege, for when I don’t wear my yarmulke or Magan David necklace, or grow my curly hair out, or get a tan (and I recognize how lucky I am in comparison to many of my fellow Jews in that regard, in that I can “pass” as White in the US if I take the effort, which is a protection not afforded to them). But I still don’t fall under your limited either/or classification. My roots and my blood go deeper than my skin. 
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/s, I guess?
It’s a pretty big and well-established charter airline, too.
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That was my first thought when he used “respected” and “Ryanair” in the same sentence, too. 
Seriously though, Ryanair sucks.
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And that supports my statement. These people are pumped full of the fear and no real useful information, which makes them irrational and unreliable. Governments are responsible for security and outsourcing to people who they attempt to transform into paranoid safety zombies is a terrible tactic.
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[quote=“ActionAbe, post:48, topic:82795, full:true”]
So profiling is okay then? I’m confused as to the relevance here. [/quote]
I don’t pretend to know what’s OK now. I’m just pointing out that there is a particular problem in the UK which some of these policies are created to address, and while they might be completely reprehensible ways to address them these distinctive problems make the situation enough different from that in the US that the US examples you’ve brought up do not apply. The context is completely different.
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I think you’ve made a case that it is at least plausible that the FA’s actions were related to the practice of Jihadi wives, which I didn’t see as at all plausible when I responded to @jamesnsc so I’ve learned something and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to promote a more nuanced discussion.
However the proposition remains that this type of intervention is a potentially useful and helpful tool, and I can’t see that at all justified. How many Muslim women will be alienated by racial profiling like this, versus the actual Jihadis who are identified and may be helped (or detained indefinitely under anti-terrorism laws)?
Travel to Syria attracts serious attention in Australia too, but this woman did not travel to Syria. This woman embodies the very essence of the best kind of solution to radicalism, she is a skilled professional who works to prevent radicalism occurring in the first place.
And she was racially profiled and pulled out of line as a terror suspect. It’s an incredibly potent illustration of how flawed and dangerous this approach is.
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[quote=“daneel, post:50, topic:82795, full:true”]
/s, I guess?[/quote]
You think?
It’s a pretty big and well-established charter airline, too.
It helps them that so large a fraction of the packaged holiday industry is deeply sleazy, rather than merely sleazy.
I am really glad that as an American I don’t need to add this to the list of problems I need to solve. Having a blanket opinion against profiling in the US, at least at this point, is so much easier!
Okay, which policies? A Thompson Airways policy? A police policy? An immigration policy?
What’s the policy? You see someone reading a book with Arabic on it and that’s a sign of… what? That’s a shitty policy. I don’t see any reason to be neutral on that.
I’m gonna give you some serious side-eye if you tell me British and European airlines haven’t thrown me and my swarthy kin some poor treatment. I can’t tell you why kicking people off flights in newsworthy fashion is an American phenomenon, but there are plenty of ways airline staff can be assholes to you without actively kicking you off a flight. Air France does a particularly good job in my personal experience. You do realize I’ve flown in/to Europe? Except for recently I’ve spent a good portion of my life doing a lot of flying for various reasons. So again, and I emphasize: I’m not making this up.
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Maybe you should direct them to Jewish American anthropologist Karen Brodkin’s book.
Sorry if I implied that I operate under an either/or mindset, cuz I actually don’t. I know that race and ethnicity are fictional categories that continuously shift and expand and contract and include and exclude. And I certainly don’t subscribe to the “White/POC dichotomy,” since ethnicity, for example, is clearly a third categorical concept at play here. And yes, it’s obvious to me that U.S. viewpoints about these things do not obtain other places.
Actually, given the rejection of U.S. viewpoints among what you seem to perceive as the globally minded subset of humanity that is Jewish people, it strikes me as quite the sad irony that what amounts to white supremacy is so rife in Israel.
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Where have I said this? Let me repeat something I have said:
So let me put it back to you. Suppose you’re country has had a serious problem with IS luring young Muslim women (the target range is 15-25), to come to serve as wives/concubines to the soldiers. The Muslim parents of these young women are screaming for action. What do you do that does not involve paying extra attention to young Muslim women traveling to the Middle East?
I’m trying to nail you down to an actual ideal here. You keep referring to policies, but you don’t want to tell me what they are. You tell me. We’re not talking about what policies I would implement. It’s a long time since I last represented India in the Model UN’s transnational issues committee when I was in high-school. My human-trafficking policymaking days are behind me. I’m a has-been. I’m washed up. They’ll make a gritty movie about me at some point, I’m sure. Assume I have to live with the policies others set. What are those policies and how were they applied in this case?
You dismissed US cases of FA power-tripping in an effort to argue that this was not similar or otherwise there was no reason to bring it into the mix. My argument is that racism has a way of working very similarly in many different contexts. I was essentially pre-empting you, because I’ve heard the, “They’re not racist, they’re just European” line so many times that I can oftentimes mouth it with the speaker in unison. I should have waited for you to actually say it, but I want to be very clear that the US and UK contexts are not so different from where I sit with with my tray-table stowed and my seat in the full-and-upright position.
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Genetically, Ashkenazim are immediately evident by their DNA signature. Other Jewish populations not as much, but still recognizable. The same isn’t true for other religions (except for Amish and other small endogamous religious populations).
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