December 6 , 2006

Imam Airport Incident an Orchestrated Stunt?

I have to apologize for the lack of new blogs these past two weeks. First came the Thanksgiving holiday, then the birth of my beautiful baby daughter, Juliana Marie Stakelbeck, on November 27. Needless to say, poppa Staks has been quite busy.

In my absence, one story that dominated the headlines was the expulsion of six Muslim imams from a US Airways flight out of MInneapolis. The six were returning from a conference organized by the North American Imams Federation--and according to The Washington Examiner, they were in rare form:

An airline gate agent told the Minneapolis Police Department that six Muslim men began praying very loudly and repeatedly shouting “Allah” as passengers began boarding Flight 300 bound for Phoenix Nov. 20. The six imams refused to sit on their assigned seats, moving around the cabin and arranging themselves in a pattern reminiscent of the Sept. 11, 2001 hijackings. Three asked flight attendants for heavy seat belt extenders, but then didn’t use them to buckle up. Witnesses overheard them talking about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.

Would you feel comfortable boarding a plane with these men? I suspect not. Fortunately, complaints from fellow passengers and the plane's personnel led to the six imams being bounced from the flight. What followed was the predictable media charade, with the ubiqtuous Cuuncil on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)--a radical Wahhabi group masquerading as a civil rights organization--calling for a federal investigation and accusing US Airways of Muslim profiling (perish the thought!).

I suspected from the get-go that the imams' actions were a premeditated attempt to undermine airline security, attain victim status, and reap financial gain via a lawsuit. Now Investor's Business Daily has published an interesting timeline of events that seems to back up my assertion. Check it out here.