It seems that there was a bit of hysteria caused by a woman who mistook a group of Syrian musicians on a plane fight who found themselves being accused of being terrorists doing a "dry run".
David Neiwert compares this to the anti-Japanese hysteria in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, we seem to be dooming ourselves to repeat what we did sixty years ago.
Zack Ajmal looks at some other similar cases and reflects:
I am a political liberal and a secular Muslim. I detest the terrorists and thugs who kill in the name of my religion. I am dismayed at the lack of democracy and civil liberties in Pakistan. However, when I read about incidents like the ones described in this post, I remember that like Ansar, I am a Pakistani immigrant to the US; like the Syrians on the Northwestern flight, my native language is written in the Arabic scrript; and so on. For me, unfortunately, these things are not beyond imagination. I can easily think of myself in their shoes and the feeling I get is scary. At a rational level, I understand that the US is a better place in terms of liberty than most other countries and that the chances of anything bad happening to me or my family are quite minute. I just hope that we get over these "tribal" attitudes and get to the task at hand: getting rid of terorrism and spreading democracy and human rights around the world.Aziz Poonawalla has more, including a list of "suspicious" things he's done on an airplane.