Lauren Pineda
I’m very interested to see how American Airlines responds to this situation. Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, a Muslim woman from New Jersey, took to Twitter after being escorted off an American Airlines flight by law enforcement after a verbal altercation with another White male passenger. And she says it’s because she’s, “a veiled Muslim woman.”
Videos by Rare
Amani, a blogger and Muslim activist who unsuccessfully also ran for Congress this year, was headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, from Newark Liberty International Airport. Just as everyone else, Amani had to go through TSA, Transportation Security Administration, and she was trying to remove her shoes when a man insisted that he cut her in line.
Muslim Woman Escorted Off American Airlines Flight
Had to get off my flight because a man asked a Muslim woman to get off the plane. @AmericanAir employees followed his request and gave the woman no explanation pic.twitter.com/ASZYA9Yx7d
— Jake (@yesjaketapia) November 14, 2020
She tweeted on social media, “The last 6 hours of my life have been draining & traumatizing. Today I got arrested for the first time because a man that insisted he was ‘first class’ felt entitled to blow past me at TSA security, then have me removed from our @AmericanAir flight bc he ‘felt uncomfortable.”
She continued to rant on Twitter, “I had the craziest experience in TSA this morning. An entitled white man behind me insisted on cutting me in line because I was ‘still taking my shoes off’. When I said he could wait like everyone else, he started going off about how he’s ‘pre-check’ and ‘first-class’,” and added a follow-up tweet explaining, “Guys he made a complaint about me and @AmericanAir is attempting to remove me from the flight.”
Amani also retweeted a pic that another passenger took of her getting escorted off the plane by police officers. She then posted a long video on Facebook, recording from the airplane, of a police officer explaining that she was under arrest.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh Gets Removed From Flight Because of a “White Passenger”
“Literally they called the cops on me,” she says in the video, “This man in first-class made a complaint about me because he cut me in line at TSA and now they literally have police coming to escort me off this flight right now, for no reason, literally taking this man’s word over mine.”
She then said, “He made me feel uncomfortable, this man sitting in first class. I’m a veiled Muslim woman on this flight and they’re taking his word for it,” and the flight took off after an hour’s delay.
According to the New York Post, American Airlines explained that they were, “working to understand what occurred,” but TSA claimed that there were no complaints made by passengers and that the situation was an “airline matter.”
The Port Authority police also confirmed that someone was, in fact, removed from a flight and taken into police custody. And it seems that witnesses to this situation are with Amani, and do believe that she was mistakenly taken off the North Carolina bound flight.
What we have here is the word of a man against another woman without much evidence to go off of. And I do believe that Amani did not need to be escorted off. However, I do have some questions. If this White passenger had both precheck screening and first-class seating, would he not have a different TSA screening lane to go through? And to play devil’s advocate, why didn’t Amani just let him go through as she was taking off her shoes?
But then again, with this video of her getting escorted off the plane, it’s hard to argue against her claims of favorable treatment towards the complaining passenger. If she was already settled in, why would she have to get off?
