Comment by noduerme
1 day ago
Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans).
They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up.
Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>.
Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are.
I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks.
My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger.
If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
The issue isn't really whether a Sikh might be carrying a knife (as Sikhs generally advocate non-violence and pacifism), but if an exemption is afforded to give Sikhs the right to carry weapons on a plane, whether a terrorist might then impersonate being a Sikh in order to get a weapon onboard.
The Sikh blade is ornamental, and usually blunted. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to carry a blunted blade that basically isn't even a knife. There is no concern of a terrorist using it anymore than any other blunted object, as Sikhs could be required to bring the blunted blade and the blade checked at security.
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Not a hijacking, but also maybe a reason not to give all Sikhs a pass on airport security.
> The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001. It remains the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India, and the deadliest no-survivor hull loss of a single Boeing 747
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182
I think you misunderstood me. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying that Sikhs with or without ceremonial blades are no more of a threat than Mormons wearing special underwear.
[edit] To be more specific: An individual with an extreme belief about anything is as dangerous as an extremist member of a group with extreme beliefs. So the smart thing is to look at the beliefs and extramicy of each person. If you find someone trying to board an aircraft who doesn't care if they make it to the end of their flight, that is a security problem.
I think the best and easiest idea is to prevent people from carrying weapons on airplanes. Taking over an airplane with special underwear is not a realistic threat.
In contrast, trying to interview and run background checks on every person boarding a plane to figure out if they are an extremist on a mission or not is (a) much more invasive, and (b) much less likely to work out. Especially when you actually don't want to prevent fundamentalists from flying on planes (I don't think preventing some major evangelical church leader or some radical rabbi from flying would even be constitutional, and clearly not a popular move if attempted).
Note that I am not at all advocating for extra security targeting of Sikhs or any other such religious or ethnic targeting. I am just saying that no one should be allowed to carry a weapon on board a commercial airplane, for any reason.
Congrats for being one of today’s 10,000! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Airlines_Flight_423].
Notably in India, there have been a few times where Sikhs have been at the head of violent revolts - and a few times where they have been targeted by violent purges/genocides.
They’re generally pretty chill, but they aren’t pacifists.
Indeed, I didn't know about this incident, thanks for sharing it.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that Sikhs are more or less likely than any other group to be pacifist. I was saying we shouldn't even be having this discussion, and simply scan people for weapons, and use things like actual random screening to help as needed. And that religious reasons for carrying weapons are not a valid excuse.
I'd say that incident falls under political extremism, not religious extremism. Which is all the more reason to check people's individual beliefs rather than their race or ethnicity. Anyone from any background can be radicalized; some formatting is more prone to it than others. Sikhs, as you say, are pretty chill. Not being pacifist doesn't mean you want to go out and kill anyone.
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scuse me, is there another major religion in modern times whose popular leaders sanctify taking the lives of disbelievers to get to heaven? I'm waiting, I'd love to hear about another one.
Hangry, cramped, tired, entitled, redneck is easily #1 on the air rage list.
Not exactly an ideology though.
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No, not at all. I was simply combating the idea that the kinds of reasons that lead to people being less likely to become regular criminals (a religious reason to carry a weapon, being licensed and trained with a weapon) would apply to their risk profile on airplanes.