i understand the comments i'm reading and i'm concerned..
but let's look at it from the other side of the coin..
there are issue with terrorism? yes..
a random (stupid) joe sees someone from middle east speaking in arab, he cannot understand what's going on, the only thing he can do is one of the following:
1) be a bigot (like the passenger did)
2) be oblivious to everything
3) pray that it's only your pessimism projecting an unrealistic scenario in your mind..
I'm not saying that the passenger did the right thing, far from it, but as it stands now, from a purely practical point of view the terrorism is winning, in making us concerned towards other individual that have not done us any harm and in most case (in pretty much 99,999999999999% or add even some more
) are not going to do us any harm.. but they are fearful (stupid, bigot, but ultimately simply fearful) and will try to weasel out of a (unbelievably low chance) problematic situation...
this is depressing because this won't harm the western citizen (i mean, statistically speaking the sheer number of dead due to terrorist attack is so minuscule compared to potential target, that if you were to be a cinic it would be negligible numerically speaking.. being instead a rational human being, even one innocent death is always one death too many), but will only increase the "distance" between western culture and middle-eastern citizen in general that will not be able to continue the (hard and slow) path to a real integration in the western community (and i mean a "civil" integration, not a religious one.. for all i care, if you're a decent human being, you can even be a pastafarian worshipper of the spaghetti god, and i won't be fazed.. what you choose to believe is up to you)...