• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

British woman held after being seen reading book about Syria on plane

Status
Not open for further replies.

SystemBug

Member
Faizah Shaheen, a psychotherapist in Leeds, was detained by police at Doncaster airport on 25 July, on her return from her honeymoon in Turkey. A Thomson Airways cabin-crew member had reported Shaheen on her outbound flight two weeks earlier, as she was reading the title Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline.

Police officers questioned Shaheen for 15 minutes under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, under which the police can detain individuals without grounds for suspicion of involvement in criminal activities, including terrorism.

Source is The Guardian

As a brown skinned person, this is one of the reason's I don't fly out to visit my family in the states anymore. I have been detained myself when I was 16 for some minutes for having "suspicious" items in my bag.

Every-time I have traveled since then, I have been "randomly" checked
 
as a white male the closest to racial profiling I've come is getting led to the women's queue constantly when travelling to the middle east and I immediately cut my hair afterwards.
 
I have seen hundreds of news on neogaf, I have thought it many times, but this is the first time I'm posting it.

This is absolutely fucking ridiculous. I can't even fathom this. It's absurd.


Edit: i can't honestly get my brain going into a thought process as to how these things happen.

The best I can get is that it's an absurd level of prejudice, stupidity and paranoia.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
Gods, people are stupid. I'd blame the "see something, say something" mentality and all those signs saying that in American airports, except this was in the UK. I guess this toxic, paranoid mentality is festering there too. And because she was carrying a book with "Syria" in the title? Holy shit. -_-

My boyfriend has long dark hair and a beard (though he's white as fuck) and we've often had our luggage searched when coming back home through Canadian customs, and people in that line is 99% brown-skinned people, every single time. They claimed it was random, but we sure as shit knew better.
 

Theonik

Member
Racial profiling aside I can see why this was worth investigating. Turkey, reading information about Syria, and the recent rise in attacks in European soil from radicalised nationals triggers too many flags not to investigate. People are in paranoid levels of high alert.
 

Valhelm

contribute something
Sometimes I wonder, if I was browner would my interest in the Syria conflict get me into trouble?
 

dyergram

Member
Weird that you read things like this but time and time again it seems that people who actually are terrorists and are being watched managing to carry out attacks.
 
Government backed bigotry in the guise of "safety" and "anti-terrorism". Many bad laws and regulations were rushed through after 9/11.
 

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
I used to work with pyrotechnics. I'm brown and tend to sport a messy beard and being someone with Asperger's I'm awkward and off putting at times. I was always scared when I had to fly for my job and would scrub my hands till they nearly bled in case they did that little wand swipe thing to test for explosive residue.
 
Picture of said Officer;

p00d3xld.jpg


Damn I miss that show.
 
as a white male the closest to racial profiling I've come is getting led to the women's queue constantly when travelling to the middle east and I immediately cut my hair afterwards.


You can still be profiled. As a single white male who travels to Thailand often, there hasn't been one time in 10 years where i wasn't stopped when coming back and had my luggage searched and had to answer questions of why I went there alone.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Top Bottom