On Sunday afternoon, news broke that fighter jets had been scrambled to escort two planes — one bound for Detroit, the other for New York. It was, subconsciously at least, what many had been expecting: a terrorist attempt on the anniversary of 9/11.
When the planes landed the fears turned out to be unfounded. Three passengers were detained in Detroit and later let go after questioning. In New York, the on-board air marshal determined that the incident was not terror-related before the plane landed.
One woman, however, did not see the experience as particularly funny. Shoshana Hebshi-Holt boarded a Frontier Airlines flight Sunday after a weekend celebrating her sister’s birthday in California. The 35-year-old mother of 6-year-old twins was hoping to make it home in time for dinner.
Instead, she wound up handcuffed, strip-searched and questioned as a possible terrorist.
Much to her shock, the cops came to her row and handcuffed her and the two men. In the police car on the tarmac,
After she was strip-searched and questioned and held in a cell, the authorities let her go to muse over what had happened to her country.
Hebshi-Holt was not the only Arab-American to take to the web after experiencing backlash on Sunday. A Texas-based Arab-American wrote on Yelp after a bar in Houston drew a plane flying toward
I've never seen a Jew and an Arab truly get along. My Jewish mother and Saudi father divorced when I was five, and are just now, twenty-one years later, able to have civil, at times friendly, discourse. But they once loved each other very deeply, and I believe they still do on some level. They share an underlying understanding of the person underneath the Arab or Jewish skin they were born into and of the beliefs and values each holds because of their respective upbringings.
I was brought up with both cultures, though the Jewish side had a decidedly stronger presence. But I know the struggle of sympathizing with both and being unable to side with either. Even during my Bat Mitzvah, when I assumed the privileges and obligations of an adult Jew, my dad left after the rabbi made what he perceived as an anti-Arab comment.
I haven't been to a High Holy Day service in a while--probably five or six years. Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, were always torturous for me to sit through during my pre-college youth, before I could choose whether or not to attend.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/shoshana-hebshi-holt-arrested-on-frontier-flight-on-911-anniversary-speaks-out/2011/09/13/gIQAPwdAQK_blog.html
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