Alaska Airways wrongfully eliminated two Black Muslim males from one among its flights in Washington state after a fellow passenger complained about one of many males sending a textual content message in Arabic, a current federal lawsuit alleges.
Abobakkr Dirar and Mohamed Elamin boarded a visit in Seattle headed to San Francisco in February 2020, the lawsuit states. Simply earlier than takeoff, Dirar despatched textual content messages and emojis to a good friend who wasn't on the aircraft. One other passenger, who could not learn or converse Arabic, noticed the textual content messages and complained to an Alaska Airways flight crew member, Dirar and Elamin's legal professionals stated in a assertion.
The lawsuit, filed August 2, claims the unnamed passenger who reported the boys shortly stood up, grabbed his bag and exited the aircraft. An Alaska Airways supervisor then deplaned Dirar and Elamin, after which the boys had been subjected to further safety checks and blocked from boarding a aircraft collectively on a re-booked flight. Airport safety personnel additionally took Dirar's cellphone, the lawsuit alleges.
"Alaska Airways' discrimination of those males not solely interrupted their enterprise journey, but additionally triggered them severe long-lasting emotional misery and immense stress to keep away from the eye of others and conduct themselves in methods which conceal their ethnic and non secular identities when flying," legal professionals stated within the assertion.
Alaska Airways stated it takes discrimination critically however will not remark intimately concerning the case as a result of it is pending litigation. The Seattle firm is being sued for discrimination beneath state and federal civil rights statutes.
"Our best accountability is to make sure that our flight operations are protected day-after-day, and that features complying with federal rules on investigating any passenger security reviews," the airways stated in a press release to CBS MoneyWatch.
Dirar and Elamin are bearded males who had been born in Sudan however at the moment are U.S. residents, the lawsuit states. The buddies had been touring to San Francisco to buy automobiles that they had been then going to drive again north to Washington state, in keeping with the lawsuit. After airport police took Dirar's telephone, authorities realized the textual content messages he had been sending had been innocent, the lawsuit reads.
Dirar stated in a press release that he is suing in hopes that Alaska Airways won't ever mistreat one other Muslim American.
"I'll go to the tip of this course of as a result of I would like the airways to cease doing this to any individual," he stated. "Once we traveled that day, we weren't handled the identical as different individuals, and it made me really feel like I used to be not equal to different individuals."
Dirar and Elamin's legal professionals say their shoppers' incident is steeped within the Islamophobia that persists within the U.S. 20 years after the September 11, 2001 assaults.
Muslim People say they nonetheless face hostility 20 years after 9/11 however the hate crimes directed towards them — together with mosque burnings and different violence — are now not front-and-center.
The variety of anti-Muslim hate crimes reported to the FBI grew from 107 in 2009 to 176 in 2019, in keeping with the newest federal information out there. On Tuesday, police in New Mexico arrested and charged a 51-year-old man with the homicide of two Muslim males in Albuquerque.