JustASC

Everyone’s in a tizzy about the US Airways jet that had to make a cautionary landing because a passenger thought a boy’s tefillin looked suspicious. Comments range from “the airlines are over-cautious” to “the boy was disruptive” (not true) to “the kid was stupid” to “Why is this a story?” to “this is what you get when you don’t acknowledge the real enemy” (i.e., radical Islam).

The wisest comments on this came from a Hasidic politician in Brooklyn, quoted in the Times story:

Some observant Jews said they were not surprised that the ritual had attracted attention — or that people on the plane would have been unfamiliar with it. “When they see a passenger strapping yourself,” said Isaac Abraham, a Satmar who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and campaigned for the Democratic nomination for a City Council seat last year, “you might as well strap yourself with hand grenades. They have no idea.”

“He probably just figured, ‘I have nothing else to do on the plane, I might as well use this time to pray,’ ” he added. “Other people read. They watch a movie. He figured, ‘Let me grab the time.’ But the obvious reality of it is that when we see people carrying explosive material in their shoes and their pants and I am the passenger next to him and see someone strapping, I would panic too.”