The flying imams: Case uncracked?
Over at Hot Air Allah enters a dissent from Katherine Kersten's cracking of the case of the flying imams in today's Star Tribune. Allah writes (links omitted):
Piece this out for me: CAIR allegedly wants to engineer an incident it can sell to the public as evidence of discrimination and get the End Racial Profiling Act pushed through — and for the task it chooses a guy who admits that his mosque used to help out Osama Bin Laden, who’s been accused of raising money for Hamas, and who doubts that 9/11 was carried out by Muslims? And instead of just praying, he and the other five imams resort to hijack-type behavior that’s suspicious enough to spook multiple air marshals and pilots?Kersten's column hypothesizes that the case of the flying imams was a stunt engineered to support the passage of anti-profiling legislation. Kersten, however, does not identify a director in the production. My candidates would be Keith Ellison and Omar Shahin. I don't think either Ellison or CAIR would have conducted a background check on Shahin in any event. (Allah ignores Kersten's discussion of the Muslim American Society Freedom Foundation, the American arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.) I think it's fair to say that Ellison's personal experience with the organs of the mainstream media would give him little reason to think that the the imams' backgrounds or credibility would be subject to serious scrutiny. On the contrary.Doesn’t that actually make things more difficult for their Democratic allies in Congress? I can buy that CAIR would do this to raise their own profile; they probably are that stupid and it’s not like they have anything to lose in terms of reputation at this point. But they’ve got to know that this makes things considerably harder for Pelosi, Conyers, and Feingold in getting the bill passed. Not to mention the fact that grassroots pressure on Bush to veto the bill if it ever comes before him will be tremendous now, thanks in great part to this very incident.
Besides, the bill only applies to state actors....
Allah then looks at the terms of the proposed anti-profiling law to determine whether it would affect the conduct of airlines and other private actors in future incidents. Kersten accurately quotes the terms of the proposed law consistent with Allah's point. Allah ignores the intervention of law enforcement authorities in removing the imams for questioning in response to the crew's report. It is not at all clear to me that the proposed law would not affect the conduct of law enforcement authorities in such incidents, and I think it likely would. I think Kersten's cracking of the case at the least withstands Allah's skepticism.
The alternative to Kersten's hypothesis is that the imams' behavior was explicable as something other than an intentional provocation. Among other things, I have yet to see or hear an explanation of the imams' request for the seat belt extensions that the two or three imams who requested them placed under their seats. Allah doesn't offer an alternative explanation of the imams' resported conduct for our consideration. Allah's skepticism, while warranted in theory, has not yet been reconciled with the facts as reported. And the larger point that the incident seems to have been fabricated for ulterior purposes would stand in any event.
