Arabic-speaking student sues airline, alleging bias
A UC Berkeley student who was kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight in 2016 after speaking in Arabic on his cell phone has sued the airline, claiming it discriminated against him.
Southwest “punished him for publicly displaying his identity,” lawyers for Khairuldeen Makhzoomi said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in San Francisco federal court.
Makhzoomi fled Iraq as a refugee in 2002. He was a 26-year-old senior at Berkeley, studying public policy, when he attended an invitationonly event in Los Angeles in April 2016 that included a dinner with Ban Ki-moon, then the U.N. secretary-general. He had boarded a plane for Oakland and said he was talking with his uncle on the phone about the meeting when he was interrupted by a Southwest agent and two police officers.
The agent, Shoaib Ahmed, started talking to him in Arabic, and Makhzoomi said he asked him to speak in English. Ahmed then told him he seemed to be having a serious conversation, asked whom he had been speaking to, then asked why he had been talking in Arabic and added, “You know the environment is very dangerous,” the suit said.
He was ordered to leave the plane and was held for 45 minutes, then patted down and searched in front of a crowd of onlookers and police officers, some with dogs, the suit said. It said FBI agents then took him to a room, interrogated him and searched his belongings.
“I think you’re done with Southwest,” an agent told him, according to the lawsuit. “Next time you are flying, don’t use your phone, just sit there. And I advise you to apologize to Southwest.”
He was released “after hours of questioning, searching, and pleading innocence,” the suit said. Southwest refunded his plane ticket but refused to let him fly, and he booked a flight on another airline.
Makhzoomi, who is now a graduate student, never engaged in “any suspicious, loud, rowdy, unruly, inciteful or inappropriate behavior,” his lawyers said. They said Southwest had no reason to remove him “except for racial bias and discrimination.”
The incident was not unique. In the previous year, a Muslim American woman on a United Airlines flight was denied a can of Diet Coke because of fears it would be used as a weapon, and a Muslim family was removed from another United flight after asking for help with their child seat.
“What Mr. Makhzoomi experienced is the essence of religious profiling, and every Muslim airline passenger’s worst nightmare,” said Zahra Billoo, Bay Area executive director of the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations, which is helping to represent Makhzoomi.
In a statement shortly after the incident, Southwest Airlines said another Arabic-speaking passenger had reported comments that were “perceived to be threatening” to the crew, which “responded by following protocol, as required by federal laws, to investigate and report to law enforcement agencies any threat to civil aviation.”
The airline noted that it had refunded the return ticket price and said it regrets “any lessthan-positive experience a customer has on board our aircraft . ... Southwest neither condones nor tolerates discrimination of any kind.”