Emergency Exit

THE DOMESTIC-FRONT PRESS COVERAGE of our war on terrorism has featured at least a half dozen stories of knuckle-dragging American provincial lugnuts who have bolted from commercial flights upon finding a couple of kaffiyeh-wearing gentlemen aboard. These stories generally end the same way. The offending Arabs, it always turns out, were doctors heading to a neurological research conference, say, or a banker and his brother on their way to a niece's wedding in Scottsdale. The general reaction from politicians and the press has been: Shame on us. The proper way for red-blooded Americans to react to such incidents, it is strongly implied, is with embarrassment verging on revulsion -- at our compatriots' ignorance, intolerance, and cowardice.

I disagree, but then again I would. I'm one of the lugnuts. Two weeks ago, I walked off an overnight flight from San Francisco because it had too many Arabs on it.

At least that was part of the reason. I've flown a lot since September 11, but, even given wartime conditions, security seemed high that night. With only two flights remaining to leave from my terminal before the airport closed, the metal detector was manned by a dozen soldiers with machine guns. Army, by the way -- not National Guard. After we'd handed over our tickets, there was a second checkpoint. A table had been set up in the walkway to the flight. There, more soldiers were taking everyone's carry-on luggage to pieces, almost literally: unscrewing lipsticks, disassembling pens, removing batteries from cell phones and computers. One soldier peered into a plastic box of tic tacs as he rattled it.

It was one of those planes with three seats on either side of the narrow aisle, and all six seats in the front row were occupied by Arab men in their early 20s, dressed in a kind of shabby-casual way, in either blazers or those car-upholstery leather jackets. They were nice-enough looking guys, I must say, but that thought didn't help. I recalled an excerpt from the terrorist manual seized from one of the September 11 hijackers' cars: "If a Muslim is in a combat or godless area, he is not obligated to have a different appearance from those around him. ...Resembling the polytheist in religious appearance is a kind of 'necessity-permits-the-forbidden.'" They were all looking rather blankly in front of them towards the cockpit door -- a rather flimsy one, I now noticed.

What's the likelihood that all six passengers in the front row of a plane will be Middle Easterners? Assuming the country is 2 percent Arab, and that plane seating is wholly random (an improbable assumption, I grant), you just raise .02 to the sixth power and you have your answer: about 1 in 16 billion. I then started totting up ethnicities with the zeal of a college-admissions officer. Five of the twelve passengers in the second and third rows were young Arab men as well.

I buzzed the stewardess. She turned out to be a perky Midwestern young lady. "So . . . ," I said, not knowing quite how to put it. "Is this some kind of . . . em . . . group tour?" She hadn't a clue what I was getting at. So I asked her to walk back to the exit with me, and told her why I was getting off the plane.

MY FRIENDS have all reacted identically. First they commiserate with me for my embarrassingly uncosmopolitan behavior. That is, when they don't overtly accuse me of being uncouth. "And how did you know they were Arabs?" a fellow editor scolded me. "They could have been Persians . . . or even Israelis." (For one thing, they weren't. For another, do I need to get a graduate degree in anthropology to have the right to protect myself?)

The second thing my friends say is that they would have wanted to get off that plane, too, but would never have had the "guts." ("Aw, shucks," I reply. "It was nothin'.") Frightened as Americans are of terrorism, they're more frightened still of political correctness. This is an attitude they share with our politicians, from President Bush on down. Do you believe the president when he insists that America's radical Islamic leaders "love this country just as much as I do"? Or how about Richard Gephardt, who a week after September 11 was still fantasizing that "we don't know who did all of this. We don't know what ethnic group they may be part of. We don't know what religious background they may have." And that is the nub of why I walked off that plane. I worry that, when push comes to shove, my government will be too polite to protect me.

This is, of course, the first war in which literally any American -- not just soldiers -- can die in an attack. That doesn't scare me in the slightest. It's in God's hands whether I die of terrorism. But it's in my hands whether I die of political correctness. I don't plan to.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.

Nice post (you beat me to it!)

I don't know what I would have done in that situation. I hate to admit it, but in addition to peer pressure not to appear politically-incorrect, one other issue to deal with is the high cost of air travel. Yes, my life is worth more than the piddling $1K (or whatever) it would cost to buy a ticket home, but, at the same time, there is still the uncertainty, as even Caldwell would admit, that these men were terrorists (after all, we haven't heard that Caldwell's plane was attacked); in truth, much higher odds that they are a group of Middle Eastern students traveling together. Very interesting article, and it poses an interesting thought experiment for all of us to consider what we would have done.

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