The airplane was heading toward the runway at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport when eyewitnesses said the Orthodox man began to pray.Read my analysis of this story at Covenant Zone.
"He was clearly a Hasidic Jew," said Yves Faguy, a passenger seated nearby. "He had some sort of cover over his head. He was reading from a book.
"He wasn't exactly praying out loud but he was lurching back and forth," Faguy added.
The action didn't seem to bother anyone, Faguy said, but a flight attendant approached the man and told him his praying was making other passengers nervous.
"The attendant actually recognized out loud that he wasn't a Muslim and that she was sorry for the situation but they had to ask him to leave," Faguy said.
The man, who spoke neither English nor French, was escorted off the airplane.
Air Canada Jazz termed the situation "delicate," but says it received more than one complaint about the man's behaviour.
The crew had to act in the interest of the majority of passengers, said Jazz spokeswoman Manon Stewart.
"The passenger did not speak English or French, so we really had no choice but to return to the gate to secure a translator," she said.
The airline is not saying if the man was told he was not allowed to pray, but a spokesperson said the man was back on board the next flight to New York.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
The wrong kind of fear of the sacred will destroy us
A Hasidic Jew was recently forced to leave an Air Canada flight from Montreal to New York because his praying scared fellow passengers:
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Well, speaking as a "decadent" North American secular person -- and no, we are not all knuckle-dragging Leftards, some of us are, for example, of Objectivist background and our convictions are quite solidly grounded, thank you -- I suggest that the more likely explanation for the behavior of these passengers is ignorance of Hasidic customs rather than some phobia about the "sacred". Although most people at some point have seen orthodox Jews praying on TV, too many people seem to absorb little or no information from what they see unless it has to do with sports, whatever Brangelina is up to lately, or "LOST". They have no frame of reference, so inside a locked airplane such activity can seem threatening to them while the rest of us would recognize it as benign. (Alas, it would be too much to expect them to realize that even a disguised Jihadist would be screaming "Allahu Akbar!" instead of reciting Hasidic prayers and would hardly be doing so before the plane is even airborne!) While such ignorance is deplorable, at least people are paying attention to what is going on around them on an airplane, which they probably would not have been doing on 9/10/2001.
rra, i am myself quite a secular person. My target is not secularism; rather it is that combination of secularism and anti-Judeo-Christian delusion that often goes by the name of Gnosticism. I note that you put the word sacred in scare quotes. And that may be a sign of the problem I see: denial or doubt of something fundamental to human nature. The sacred is a fundamental anthropological fact that few secular people take seriously. The sacred is certainly a worldly reality, and is essential to properly understanding human behaviour (e.g. why you can charge twice as much, or more, for a Nike shirt as the same shirt without the swoosh), whether or not God or any other supernatural being "exists". You say the passengers were ignorant and hence feel threatened, but how or why do we feel threatened by things of which we are simply ignorant?
No doubt it's often necessary to distinguish among different kinds of relationships to the sacred and maybe I should have in this post. We can simultaneously fear and desire the sacred, because it is an inherently paradoxical force that attracts and repels our attention. "Look, respect, represent, but don't touch", is its basic message. It's often said that fear of the sacred (or of its divine guarantor) is the basis of wisdom. That's very true. But it can also be the basis of unwisdom, which is what was on my mind when I posted.
I understand your point, truepeers, and I tend to agree in a more generalized context. But I don't see how it pertains to people on an airplane witnessing what for many of them was probably unfamiliar religion-related appearance (if the individual was in full Hasidic dress) and behavior (he was described as praying in the orthodox manner, which involves a lot of bowing). I think some of them simply became frightened because they've come to believe that "strange" religious behavior = fanaticism = danger. 5 years and 1 week ago they would probably have thought nothing of it, or merely have been curious. It's deplorable that there is so much ignorance about the meaning of various religious customs, surely. (Though it might have prevented a lot of trouble had the Hasidic individual quietly informed those next to him what religion he belonged to and that he wished to pray and not to be concerned. A little common sense on both sides wouldn't hurt in such situations.)
RRA, the problem was that he spoke neither English nor French. The crew might have asked if anyone on board spoke Hebrew or Yiddish in order to let him show others that he was just a Jew; and he may well have stopped praying if asked. Barring that, the crew should have asked those who were demonstrating the irrational fear to leave the plane, not the Jew. But I fear the crew may have been complicit in stirring up the fear. Judeophobia is common enough in Quebec.
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