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Posted on 09/30/2001 5:45:53 PM PDT by Utah Girl

      Memo to the three Arab-American Utah residents who were bumped off their Northwest Airlines flight a couple of weeks ago just for looking Arab and who have subsequently solicited the help of Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff to demand apologies and retribution:
      Give us all a minute here, will you?
      Out of our three tallest buildings, we — and I'm including you in the "we" — just lost two of them, and almost a fifth of the Pentagon, all blown to bits because of head-on collisions with airplanes flown on purpose by people of Arab descent with appearances similar, unfortunately in this case, to yourselves. More than 6,000 people are presumed dead, and thousands more physically injured, to say nothing of the emotional damage on the national psyche.
      This was all at the apparent behest of an Arabian extremist named Osama bin Laden who in February 1998 declared war on all of us Americans by declaring, and I quote, "We, with God's help, call on every Muslim who believes in God and wishes to be rewarded to comply with God's order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it."

      So bin Laden's minions struck, and the reaction was immediate. So, as you discovered firsthand, was the overreaction. For one thing, lots of people missed their flights. A friend of mine was in Chicago and ready to fly back to Salt Lake on the Tuesday the tragedy hit. He had to get back to work, so he took a Greyhound bus, and then that broke down. Finally, he and four strangers rented a van together in Omaha, Neb., and drove the rest of the way home.
      I know of a Salt Lake businessman who got grounded out of town and couldn't book a rental car because they were all booked. So he bought a car to get back.
      Everybody knows people with stories like that.
      The weekend after Terrorist Tuesday, I was all set to fly to Dallas on what the airlines call a "buddy pass" and wasn't allowed to use it because they didn't want any standbys in the concourse because standbys looked too suspicious. So I ended up driving to Texas and back.
      For a while there, right or wrong, we invoked the Bubba Smith philosophy of defense, which is to tackle everyone and then sort through them until you find the one with the ball. Especially in the first frantic days, no one was beyond suspicion.
      We were ALL profiled.

      You got bumped from one flight. More than 100,000 pilots, flight attendants and airline workers got bumped from their jobs, and that's to say nothing of the people lying in that rubble in New York who will never get the chance to have the airlines lose their luggage again.
      Mark Shurtleff's office is investigating whether your civil rights were violated. Of course they were. Guys who flunked out of the first term of a mail-order law school know that.
      But this time just let it go. Chalk it up to mitigating circumstance. I'll bet it never happened before and will not happen again. Look around you. The country's still free. You can still pray anywhere to anything you want to. You won't go to jail for worshipping as you please. You can cross borders when and where you wish. You don't have to worry about being profiled as — how does Osama bin Laden put it? — the "devil's supporters" simply because you happen to work in a stock brokerage house on the 78th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center.
      It's still a free country and you are still free to enjoy it — and, for that matter, sue it.

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