Social Media Erupts After Passenger Calls United Flight Attendant’s Uniform ‘Terrorist Attire’
A passenger on a January 15th United Airlines flight from New York LaGuardia to Chicago O’Hare took to social media to decry a flight attendant “dressed as part of a terrorist group.” The attire is not that of a terrorist group as such, and the passenger is being called out as racist.
Alleged United cabin crew makes racist and xenophobic comments about fellow crew member….white flying for free.
byu/SatisfactionDapper7 inflightattendants
Aviation watchdog JonNYC notes that the person who took the photo appears to be a United Airlines retiree, “I’m guessing she’s gonna lose nonrev privileges.” One commenter notes, “the union and management is now involved and it’s being actively investigated.”
When making these sorts of claims, it’s important to be right. I don’t like the uniform standards that allow this – I see it as unprofessional and inconsistent with the desired look for the airline. It also stands out as different and draws too much attention to the individual crewmember. But that doesn’t associate them with terrorism. That’s an unfair charge.
Far more fair, I think, to criticize other employees that United Airlines has defended. For instance, while Delta and JetBlue have changed their policies to forbid Palestinian flag pins, United Airlines defends cabin crew wearing Palestinian flag pins as ‘designating language skills’ even though ‘Palestinian’ isn’t a language, it’s not clear that those wearing the pins necessarily speak Arabic, and it’s not a standard designator for those who do.
While cabin crew express their views on the conflict in the region inside a metal tube, they do so while exercising power over passengers. It isn’t free speech, it’s asymmetric speech. And it goes even further. After initially imposing a suspension, United refused to say whether a pilot who celebrated the atrocities committed by Hamas on 10/7 still flies for them.
There’s little question that the civilian plight that existed in Gaza is heartbreaking, though as the Current Thing it gets far more attention than perhaps the world’s greatest refugee crisis in Syria where over half the nation’s Muslims were forced to leave their homes. It is more difficult to use the situation in Syria as a bludgeon against Israel and Jews. Meanwhile, every statement about the plight in Gaza should accurately end with “because of Hamas.”