More Unicorn Rights

Those Muslim Imams who were correctly pulled off a plane a couple of weeks back want their own prayer rooms at the Airport.

They might draw less attention, they told airport officials Friday, if they had a separate room in which they could say one of their five daily prayers to Mecca.

"When we pray, we don't want a problem. We don't want what happened last week," said Abdulrehman Hersi, an imam at Darul-Quba mosque in Minneapolis, referring to the group of six Muslim clerics who were removed last week from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis after attracting concern from some passengers.

The group of Somali clerics said they wanted to open better lines of communication with airport officials after both the US Airways incident and a recent flap over Muslim cab drivers who didn't want to pick up passengers carrying alcohol.

"We are users of the airport too, and we don't want to get into a situation where Muslims feel we are being marginalized at the airport," said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul and the organizer of the demonstration and meeting.

Airport Director Steve Wareham said he'd consider setting aside a private area for prayers, or simply for passengers who need a few minutes of quiet time. He said some airports around the country have so-called "meditation rooms" for that purpose.

I think that's clearly a ridiculous idea. Besides, they didn't get kicked off the plane for praying. It was ignoring their assigned seats and getting into a scatter pattern almost identical to the 911 hijackers (positioning themselves at all the exits to the plane), and screaming out Allah every few minutes. Even if that screaming didn't scare you, it's annoying as hell. It would be like what would happen to me if I shouted outI'm handsome every two minutes on a flight.

Kid H.