Is Speaking Arabic Suspicious?
According to news reports, an American Airlines flight was delayed for several hours in San Diego Tuesday night when worried passengers overheard other passengers speaking Arabic. Ironically, the men speaking Arabic were returning to their homes in Detroit after training Marines at Camp Pendleton destined for Iraq. From a linguistic point of view, I guess the silver lining is that the worried passengers were able to identify Arabic. This unfortunate incident reveals a common confusion of language, ethnicity, and religion. On the one hand, most speakers of Arabic are not terrorist material. On the other hand, potential Islamic terrorists speak many languages in addition to Arabic, including Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Persian, Indonesian, Malay, Turkish, Chechen, French, and English. A terrorist group with any intelligence will use people who do not attract attention to themselves. It isn’t surprising that hearing Arabic might make a passenger wonder, but you’d think that a moment’s thought
