Music in the Skies

So it turns out that all those menacing Arab guys on Mrs. Jacobson's plane were just Syrian musicians. In fact as it turns out the security concerns that might have actually been worth heeding in Jacobson's mostly melo-dramatic piece, were not that serious after all (via Political Animal.) Look, I'm not a liberal with my head stuck in the sand. I can understand how a group of dark-skinned Arabic gentleman milling around in my plane might cause some fleeting thoughts of terrorists to leap into the average passenger's brain. However, my response would not be to write a 3,000 word mostly hysterical and moderately racist article that contributes virtually nothing to the debate over airplane security. She leaves me with the impression that the only possible thing we could do to make her feel safer would be to ban large groups of Arabic men, or maybe all Arabic men, from flying in American planes.