Originally published at: German airline Lufthansa given record $4m fine after refusing to board Jews on Frankfurt flight - Boing Boing
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any reputation it has for making the planes arrive on time is, of course, not even true.
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Heißlufthansa
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Some said flight attendants told them on the first flight about the requirement to wear a face mask and not to gather in aisles or near emergency exits. The Lufthansa crew members did not identify any passengers who failed to obey their instructions, which the airline said was due to the sheer number of violations and because many traded seats during the flight.
The captain alerted Lufthansa security about misbehaviour among the passengers, which set in motion the steps that led to their being denied boarding on the connecting flight, according to a consent order in the case.
So what I’m hearing is that these scofflaws got special treatment, not special punishment, because they are Jews. Must be nice to not have to follow the same rules everyone else has to.
It’s not a permanent Get Out of Jail Free card. You still have to follow safety instructions.
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Pretty sure the point of this was that you can’t collectively punish a whole group of people like that for the behavior of some of them, when the only apparent connection to each other was the way they dressed and their religious identification. I haven’t seen anyone make the claim that individuals that the flight attendants could identify as rule-breakers shouldn’t have been punished. To the contrary the article said that the flight attendants could not identify individual rule breakers. Which is unfortunate but no excuse for collective punishment.
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Unless that collective is Lufthansa Airlines, a truly shitty airline at every level. I’d be happy to see all of them pay, even though only a few of them perpetrated this idiocy.
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Oh, man, the seat trading. I know exactly what that was about: for a certain dickhead subset of Hasids, a man can’t end up sitting next to a strange woman on a flight, lest he lose control of his male urges or something; so instead he walks the aisle pestering everyone else, chanting “switch? switch?” and delaying takeoff until he finds a taker.*
That’s not to excuse Lufthansa, because they lumped all the Hasids on the flight in with what was likely a handful of arseholes (though probably a greater number than the one or two who usually disrupt flights in this manner).
[* The time I was approached, I cheerfully told the devout fellow he could have my seat if he upgraded me to an available business class one. Apparently his piety only went so far and he moved on, continuing to ignore the flight attendant’s requests to sit down.]
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As @Otherbrother said, there would not have been any issue if they’d banned specific individuals who disobeyed crew member instructions. But it sounds like they failed to track who was who and ended up banning almost everybody.
That said, the behavior here is analogous to a plane full of American college kids headed to spring break in Cancun. While they might not all know each other or be “traveling together”, they probably all bought similar travel packages and many may even have been traveling on the same group plane ticket even if they didn’t know each other (there are travel agencies in the hasidic world who organize package tours for these pilgrimage events that are VERY similar to the spring break packages that American college kids buy).
And to @chgoliz’s point, I’m not sure that there would be any kind of fine if the exact same fact pattern was repeated with a bunch of American college kids all dressed alike getting banned when only a subset of them refused crew member instructions.
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Yeah, exactly. At the point where there are too many individuals moving around, congregating where they’re not supposed to, etc., not sitting in their assigned seats so there’s no way to know who they are specifically, and apparently no effort on the part of the ‘good ones’ to tell the more egregious ones to sit down, I can see how the exasperated response would be “if they’re going to act like jerks together and endanger the entire flight, they’ll have to find a different airline to put up with it”.
If there were a few guys who were trying to help the flight attendants restore order who got caught up in the flight ban, then those people, and only those people, deserve the reward.
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One of these jerks will usually result in a 10-minute delay; two of them, maybe 15-minutes. And both will be easily identifiable. More than that and things become more confusing and the delays longer.
Complicating the situation is that closed religious communities usually close ranks when confronted with outside authority trying to discipline bad actors (see the paedophilia scandals in any given religious fundie community). So it may be that none of the others tried to help the flight attendants sort things out (again, not an excuse for Lufthansa’s collective punishment).
And, worse, some of the them have the gall to cry “anti-Semitism” when their generically crappy behaviour is called out. Which I suppose might carry more weight considering the historically fraught situation in this case, but is still insulting to innocent Jews subjected to actual anti-Semitism.
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Exactly. It’s the boy crying ‘wolf’.
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Some Hasidic pilgrims seem to be extremely stubborn and uncompromising.
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Right, because “college kid” isn’t a protected class.
An interesting hypothetical would be if there was some fraternity reunion, and everybody was wearing the frat’s sweatshirt, and they all got kicked off, but it was a religious fraternity.
So, the FA’s were kicking them off because of assumed shared group membership but had no idea it was a religious identity.
But, as frustrated as the FAs were, they should have realized using markers associated with race, religion, or any other protected class is a very very bad idea.
(Kicking off spring break college kids is merely a bad idea.)
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And???
That doesn’t justify collective punishment based on the actions of a few, or even on the behavior of a significant fraction.
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But, if you were on the plane, minding your own business, trying to get comfortable before a long flight, and got kicked off because you were a Hasidic Jew (and other Hasidic Jews were misbehaving) I’m not sure what else you’d call it.
ETA: I agree it isn’t exactly anti-Semitism. But we don’t have a better word for this situation.
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As I’ve implied, there is a case to be made for callng it anti-Semitism. This was the collective punishment of a group – the majority of which did nothing wrong and who may not have been travelling together – based on their presenting as devout Jews (as you say, a protected class). That’s why I don’t have much problem with the fine.
But when a member of the Hasidic community faces consequences for behaving like an arsehole (e.g. delaying a flight and bothering other passengers) and either he or the community plays the anti-Semitism card as a defense, that’s crying wolf as @chgoliz notes.
And a very very bad look given the history of the airline and the religious group in question, as @Brainspore and @Beschizza pointed out.
That tends to be the case with religious fundie pilgrims in general, going back to the middle ages. If they want to risk entering a conflict zone or risk getting trampled in a poorly organised visit to visit some symbol of their belief, that’s their business. But when that stubbornness extends to bothering or endangering others, situations like this eventually occur.
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I’m wondering if the women they were refusing to sit next to qualify as a protected class.
Eh, who am I kidding?
But this is why I don’t see the situation as an unmitigated positive solution. Having had to deal with being on the other side of it, I can tell you it’s threatening in its own way. And somehow news coverage doesn’t even point out WHY they were standing around and changing their seats. Why is it OK to discriminate against women? What’s the difference between Christian Nationalism and this? Why does religion get a pass, every time?
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A lot of religious people can be quite rich/powerful, and have the ears of power brokers and lawmakers.
This topic seems very fraught and I don’t have a comment on it other than a German airline should be really frigging careful in a situation like this.
BUT.
I’m reminded of a flight I was on many years ago.
I was traveling domestically in the US for work and approximately half the passengers on my flight were dressed in full Hasidic garb. At the time, I didn’t really know that was a thing, so it seemed weird, but kind of interesting.
We were delayed on the tarmac for quite awhile and nobody knew what was going on. Out of boredom and curiosity, I struck up conversations with some of those passengers.
They were all very nice and I learned a lot. It was actually a pretty cool experience.
Maybe an hour or so into the delay, the captain finally made an announcement.
He said that the ground crew were patching up some micro-holes on the wings. They were nearly finished and we should be on our way shortly.
I’m not a nervous flyer and I typically appreciate transparency in most situations. BUT.
Prior to this announcement, I didn’t know “Micro-holes on the wings” was a thing and I could have gone the rest of my life without knowing. Jesus Christ.
When I get nervous, I usually do stupid stuff to amuse myself and calm down.
SO.
I stood up out of my seat. I looked around, back and forth at the mostly Hasidic dressed fellow passengers. I then announced loudly:
HOLY PLANE!!!
Remembering the collective groans and or laughs of the entire cabin still warms my heart to this day. It’s one of my proudest moments.
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