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"Half-Arab, Half-Jewish Housewife" Detained After 9/11 Flight Alleges Racial Profiling
By
John Del Signore
Published Sep 13, 2011
Modified Sep 13, 2011
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By
John Del Signore
Published Sep 13, 2011
Modified Sep 13, 2011
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Remember the initial reports that three people were detained after a flight from Denver to Detroit on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, supposedly because two of them were "making out" in the bathroom for "an extraordinarily long time"? One of the detained passengers, Shoshana Hebshi, has written all about the ordeal on her blog, and she is pissed. She's also not a member of the Mile High Club, which makes this story a lot less titillating. But she is half-Arab, half-Jewish—and she says the SWAT team dragged her off the plane in handcuffs because of her ethnic background, so there's that.
Hebshi, who describes her home in Ohio as a place where "the air smells like pigs and pesticide," had no idea the SWAT team was coming for her as the plane taxied off away from the terminal after landing. In fact, she was so oblivious that she made tweets about the unexplained delay as she waited on the plane with the others. "A little concerned about this situation," she wrote. "Plane moved away from terminal surrounded by cops. Crew is mum. Passengers can’t get up." After a half hour, she added, "I see stairs coming our way…yay!" But that yay swiftly turned to nay:
Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.
The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?” No one would answer me.
Hebshi says she was thrown in a holding cell without explanation and waited so long she lost track of time. Finally they gave her a full body cavity search, asked her a few questions, let her use the bathroom, and sent her on her way. The explanation? Someone said her row had been behaving suspiciously. Hebshi rhetorically asks her readers, "What is the likelihood that two Indian men who didn’t know each other and a dark-skinned woman of Arab/Jewish heritage would be on the same flight from Denver to Detroit? Was that suspicion enough?"
An FBI agent ultimately told her, "It’s 9/11 and people are seeing ghosts. They are seeing things that aren’t there." See, now it all makes sense—the couple who joined the Mile High Club were ghosts.
Tagged
9/11
security theater
Shoshana Hebshi
suspicious activity
tsa
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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