"Half-Arab, Half-Jewish Housewife" Detained After 9/11 Flight Alleges Racial Profiling

(Photo by Stan Brewer, courtesy of Ms. Hebshi, via Boing Boing)

Remember the initial reports that three people were detained after a flight from Denver to Detroit on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, supposedly because two of them were "making out" in the bathroom for "an extraordinarily long time"? One of the detained passengers, Shoshana Hebshi, has written all about the ordeal on her blog, and she is pissed. She's also not a member of the Mile High Club, which makes this story a lot less titillating. But she is half-Arab, half-Jewish—and she says the SWAT team dragged her off the plane in handcuffs because of her ethnic background, so there's that.

Hebshi, who describes her home in Ohio as a place where "the air smells like pigs and pesticide," had no idea the SWAT team was coming for her as the plane taxied off away from the terminal after landing. In fact, she was so oblivious that she made tweets about the unexplained delay as she waited on the plane with the others. "A little concerned about this situation," she wrote. "Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up." After a half hour, she added, "I see stairs coming our way…yay!" But that yay swiftly turned to nay:

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?” No one would answer me.

Hebshi says she was thrown in a holding cell without explanation and waited so long she lost track of time. Finally they gave her a full body cavity search, asked her a few questions, let her use the bathroom, and sent her on her way. The explanation? Someone said her row had been behaving suspiciously. Hebshi rhetorically asks her readers, "What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough?"

An FBI agent ultimately told her, "It’s 9/11 and people are seeing ghosts. They are seeing things that aren’t there." See, now it all makes sense—the couple who joined the Mile High Club were ghosts.

Contact the author of this article or email tips@gothamist.com with further questions, comments or tips.

By John Del Signore in News on September 13, 2011 11:27 AM

Comments [rss]

soothsayer

remember the plane people of september 2001 a lto of ppl were diverted to gander in canada. on the day the sky was open back up for flights, flight attendants of one of the flights back to nyc refused to fly and demanded two arabs on her plane to be strip searched before she felt "safe".

Michael Crook

She's just playing the victim...
http://theblog.michaelcrook.or...

TheOtherBob

Ok, a couple of things:

1. Stuff off with the blog spam.

2. If you're going to blog spam, at least say something intelligent. Your complaint is that her story is about herself ("me, me, me," in your words). But rather than...what, exactly? She's "playing the victim" because she's telling her story rather than...writing a 500 word essay on Palestinian politics? Explaining the finer points of Backgammon? Drafting haikus? This is a story about something that happened to her -- of course it's about her. To complain about that is such a stretch that I can't help but see a twisted worldview -- it's amazing how far you have to turn yourself in pretzels to find some way to blame her for this.

3. Telling a horrible story about something that happened to you is not "playing the victim." If a woman were to, for example, describe how a man broke into her house, raped her, stabbed her, and left her for dead, your apparent response would be "oh, come on, it's life. Yes, yes, yes, that was horrible -- now quit playing the victim and come see how *I'm* affected." In fact, her story manages to be anything BUT self-pitying -- she doesn't add anything to it or express the sort of rage that most people would be feeling. The horror in it is that it is simply horrifying in and of itself. That you manage to nonetheless complain says far more about you than about her.

4. The barely-veiled racism stuffed into your blog is...just disgusting, really. Your point seems to be that, yes, it's not right that some people face sodomization by the police just because of the color of their skin -- but, hey, suck it up brownie. You should drop the facade -- you think it's fine if brown people are arrested just based on their race because, you know, that's how America works. And, no, it's not.

5. So, apparently you're religious -- and quite the victim about it. (Little tip: some hypothetical punter trying to set you off by asking how many wives you have is not quite the same as a full cavity search.) Does it bother you at all to think that you're a reflection on your church? Oh, don't worry -- Mormons won't face persecution because of your actions, because reasonable people don't think like you do and can differentiate between "assholes who happen to be Mormon" and Mormons more generally. But...still, aren't you at least a little embarrassed to call yourself a Mormon while saying these things?

I'm just asking rhetorically -- I know you're not. You should be. But you're not.

delicats

Dumbest thing I've read all week, maybe all year.

Claudette McCubbin

Now... what are going to be the consequences? No spokesperson from Frontier apologizing? Is she suing? Iwould

RammyH

I only hope that whoever made the call/alert had to spend a few hours in a small room while they were background check. A little lecture from the FBI about how Brown does not equal Bomb would have been merited as well.

jibbly

I see we have a new troll. Let me sing to thee the unofficial welcome song:

Yum yum yum, troll food yum. Yum troll food yum, yum food troll!

Hooray!

zampano

This is what happens when we employ amateur security people to see something and say something. Then law enforcement overreacts. Sadly, we've given the Evil-Doers the upperhand.

Ghosts and bogeymen everywhere.

bggb

USA! USA!

I feel safer!

Spirit of 76

She sounds smarter than the people who reported her and maybe even the agents. Except for the Twitter addiction, of course.

Cat1982

First of all, chick could be half black/ half white, she could even be Italian, so I hardly think that the random person sitting next to her thought she was acting suspiciously just based on her race. While it's clear she is not a terrorist, what WAS she doing that caused anyone to think she was potentially someone dangerous?

TheOtherBob

Nothing. That's why this is so scary, and so disgusting. She never got out of her seat, never even said a word to anyone, just sat there like she was supposed to.

She just happened to be in a row with two Indian men, both of whom apparently had small bladders. She didn't know them, she didn't interact with them, she didn't even get up to pee herself. She literally didn't *DO* anything.

It would be comforting to say "well, just don't ______, and you won't face a strip search." That's obviously what you're hoping for -- some sort of behavior that you can cling to as the "reason" for all this. And that's understandable -- it would be nice to have something that makes it her fault, and that you wouldn't do. Some reason, in other words, that you need not fear the same happening to you, or your family -- some way that you know better.

But that's just not the case. That's what makes this so frightening -- short of (a) not flying or (b) asking to be moved away from the brown folks, there is nothing she could have done to avoid this. She did everything you could ever ask of a passenger, and this was her reward.

SFNY

Read her blog post. She wasn't doing anything at all, she didn't even get up once from her seat. She was sitting next to two "not-white" guys who didn't even know each other but who went to the bathroom one after the other. She didn't talk to her row mates until the cops were swarming the plane.
This is a case of "suspicious" = "not-white."

Cat1982

you would assume that these two guys would know better then to use the bathroom too often without it looking weird. also, in order for them to do that, SOMEONE must have said that she was doing something. She looks completely normal. unless the authorities misunderstood what the people said. frankly, if i was sitting next to two dudes who kept getting up and going to the bathroom right around 9/11 you can be sure as shit i would say something. i mean once or twice? no who cares, but multiple times, you have to think it must have looked weird.

SFNY

To report someone for going to the bathroom frequently you'd have to be both paranoid and ridiculous.

You're supposed to drink a liter of water for every hour of flying time to keep healthy (stay hydrated, avoid headaches, avoid deep vein thrombosis, avoid colds, keep that glass of wine from getting you trashed, etc.), and what goes in must come out.

Detex

Denver to Detroit is not a short flight. When you got to go you've got to go! I drink a lot of water when I fly, i use the bathroom about once an hour... do i get a full cavity search now?

bggb

re-read the story.

Someone called in a false tip b/c three South Asian-looking people were sitting together in a row.

Yes, bigotry and irrational fear exist in this country.

Cat1982

she doesnt look remotely South Asian.

bggb

some bigot saw a dark-haired, non light skinned woman sitting in a row with two South Asian men and called the cops

your analysis of her facial features is actually irrelevant.

blameus

This is definitely one of those cases where everyone's hands are tied. The U.S. will always err on the side of caution, especially given the anniversary. It just sucks that the procedural rules for this kind of thing has to be so harsh for the accused.

I'd like to know who started the ruckus in the first place. I think there should be an amendment that goes something like "persons responsible for false rumors/accusations are automatically subject to the same detain-and-strip-search procedure as the accused".