Racism at the gate


I am reposting this rather late after many bloggers and Facebookers have. It's all in support of a worthy cause: To shed light on racist behavior wherever it rears its ugly head. Abed Shaheen posted his recent experience at Beirut International Airport on Facebook. I hope it goes viral if only to push our mainstream local media to discuss this issue at length. At its core I suspect such appalling behavior is all about ignorance, having the wrong attitude, and the 'learned bully response.'


"Racism at Beirut Airport! My personal hands-on experience.

Yesterday on the 6th of October I was at gate 11 with a friend of mine waiting to board the Air Arabia flight at 20:25.

While waiting to board there was a group of foreign workers sitting with the rest of the passengers waiting for their turn. They were behaving normally as any other group of passengers would. Then sadly, the lady (looking at her uniform she apparently works for MEA Ground Services and not Air Arabia) at the gate announced on loud speaker (over the whole system covering the airport) the following: “Filipino people stop talking”; then she started giggling about it with the macho gentleman who was with her at the gate. They continued their racist behavior by announcing again “Filipino Nepal people talking not allowed here” and on and on.

Shocked, I obviously became furious and approached them and explained that this racist and discriminatory behavior is not acceptable, impolite and does not at the least reflect what employees at Beirut Airport should stand for (not to imply it’s acceptance in any other situation of course).

This unfortunately sounded like a joke to them and they went on to say “we do whatever we want and we don’t care about what you are saying”, then “management doesn’t even want this kind of people on the flight” and “even if you complain this will be thrown away and we dare you to do anything about it”. When I asked her “how would you feel if you ever wanted to travel to Europe and while queuing for your visa they told you the same thing?”, she replied “these people are different”; The macho gentleman seeing that his female friend, whom he was trying so hard to impress with his imitating giggles, was cornered with her twisted racist logic even went further to ask me to back off the counter and threatening to make a problem and to void my ticket!!

When I asked for the complaint form they answered (While still laughing of course) “take it from the flight attendants and good luck sitting next to such people on the flight” I did file an official complaint with Air Arabia and their staff was very helpful and promised to reach the message out to their management. However Air Arabia is paying MEAG for such services and they need to use their power to do greater efforts too to ensure that the people behind this are held accountable. I also sent an email today to Mr. Richard Mujais from MEAG, explaining what happened and asked him to further discuss this with me and to show us that these employees were held accountable for such racist behavior.

Until then, and as a friend suggested that they also need to be exposed please help me exposing such intolerable behavior.


Unfortunately the attitude expressed by the ground crew is symptomatic of a broader national malaise. It is one of ‘complain if you like; I will still do what I want because no one can stop me.’ This sadly is due to the fact that so many public and semi-public sector employees are political appointments, and no one dares to so much as reprimand them, let alone take further disciplinary action against them. Of course, I have no first hand evidence to support the statement of Mr. Shaheen, but this is for the management of BIA and MEAG to ascertain and to launch a formal investigation into the alleged behavior with all due haste. I have to admit when I read this I felt deep shame that some people in my country can be so callous, racist, and unfeeling, especially since so many of our young people are travelling to find work abroad just as those foreign workers at the airport are doing. We should, one would think, feel greater sympathy towards foreign workers in our country and a sense of camaraderie with the expatriate workers of the world. However, it is our arrogance, false pride, and ignorance that fuel racist attitudes and behaviors.

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orosdi-Back: A lost Beyrouth department store from an elegant age

Image
My mother told me it was located on ‘ Banks Street ’ in Down Town Beirut , the road that leads up to Riad el Solh Square . On most maps the street is also named after Riad el Solh. The store was located opposite Bank Intra, or so I was told. Presumably the location of the store was indicative of the high end goodies on sale inside. The closest comparison to Orosdi Back is the old Allied’s department store in Dubai , for those who remember Dubai in the 1980s. But Orosdi Back was a store from a different age, an age of elegance as opposed to the vulgar modern excesses of the nouveau-riche, something Beirut ’s Down Town is synonymous with! A wonderful blog dubbed ‘language hat’ published some information about the founders of this chain of department stores. According to the blog the chain of stores came about as a result of a partnership between Adolf Orosdi, a Hungarian army officer and his sons who opened a clothing store in Galata in 1855, and the Back family, who were Aust...
Read more

A Reluctant Resistance: Will They, Won't They Strike, Who Knows

Image
It’s hard for anyone to admit that they have wasted their life believing in an idea that was unrealistic and naïve even at its inception. The idea that Palestine could be liberated is one such idea that just won’t die, it keeps recirculating and reinfecting us with hope. Every 20 or 30 years some regional power decides to use this idea of liberation to achieve some kind of political success over the populations of countries in its region that it wishes to dominate.   Palestine is the perfect idea and cause, pure and good and just, just like the tale of the crucified Jesus. A story of gross injustice and cruelty heaped on a man preaching a new age religion. Same with the plight of the Palestinian people, gross injustice and cruelty. Jesus actually preached and healed and drove out demons in the very environs over which fanatical Western Jews are fighting and burning out farmers and villagers of the West Bank who have more Semitic and Canaanite DNA than many European Jews that ru...
Read more

Palestine's 100 Years War: How Our Militant Past Predicts Our Future

Image
Palestine’s 100 Years War The Past Rarely Predicts the Future, Except in the Middle East   “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” — Ernest Hemingway, 1946   For as long as I can remember my region has been at war. Everyone alive today can attest to the veracity of such a statement. We cheer the men at arms as they go off to fight, we condemn the failure to find a peaceful solution, we admire the fighter, we condemn the terrorist. We are the same people, the great mass of seated spectators, they whom we cheer and condemn, are also the same, the same breed of angry and desperate men and who can blame them, their lives have been hell.   Searching the vast archives of the internet for one of my own, a distant cousin who was one of those angry desperate men, I found an article dated March 22, 1973, in the El Paso Herald-Post titled “Middle East prediction: the worst is yet to come”. It was earie and ...
Read more