Clinton W. Taylor, the college radio station disk jockey who scooped the major media by identifying the band that flew on the now-famous Northwest Airlines Flight 327, has done more of the work that prestige reporters can’t be bothered with. He titles the long article that his legwork produced “Rashomon in the Skies”. As in the classic Japanese movie, first hand accounts of the same incident agree on very little. He has interviewed one of the musicians who was on the flight, the group’s tour manager and other persons with connections to the incident. He has also found two (unfortunately anonymous) passengers who appear to back up Annie Jacobsen’s original tale of highly suspicious behavior by Middle Eastern passengers, to which the flight crew reacted with strange passivity. On the other hand, his information discredits reports that the Syrians were allowed to travel on expired visas; there were problems with their paperwork (possibly due to routine INS incompetence), but it was all in order by the time that they boarded the airplane.
What really happened on Flight 327 remains murky, and it is hard to draw sweeping conclusions. It is tolerably clear that, in this particular case, there was no real threat. It was, at worst, an instance of undisciplined guys acting stupidly. That is the theory of the tour promoter’s former partner, who gave Mr. Taylor the names of the band members and information that helped him track down witnesses.
I asked about the suspicious behavior of the band and the former partner acknowledged that it was quite likely they were being rowdy and disorderly. They were on tour 24-7, she said, with very little sleep and lots of drinking and partying. She did not think Ms. Jacobsen’s account of their actions was at all implausible. She cited cultural differences language barriers as a likely source of the misunderstanding. “In the Middle East they’re not disciplined to follow orders, and to stand in line...They’re proud of who they are,” she explained. “It’s an Arab thing.”
It is not, however, paranoid to be concerned about terrorists disguised as innocent oboe players. From the tour manager:
Mr. Kamel said something I didn’t expect him say: there are Middle Eastern bands out there with ties to terror groups. “I am a proud Arab American,” he said. “But I don’t deny there are some bad people” out there. He then named a couple of singers – I will demur from repeating their names, but they appear to be quite prominent in Middle Eastern music – whom he said had tried to enter the United States but were turned down because of alleged connections to [radical] Shi’a or to Hezbollah. One of them played at a party linked to Hezbollah. A rockin’ affair that must have been.
Mr. Kamel has no problem with keeping terror-linked bands out of the United States. “That’s how I like it!” he said. “Check them out and stop them over there – if there’s a problem, don’t even let them in.” He also welcomed surveillance of the bands while in the United States: “You have to have some people follow [the bands] around, so you don’t leave people behind. You don’t want to come over with 14 and leave with 12.”
In case you missed that: A successful promoter with intimate knowledge of the Middle Eastern music scene admits that a few connections exist between Islamic terrorists and musicians, and that care is warranted in screening the musicians’ visits to the United States. For those of you in the “mere paranoia” camp: Denial isn’t just a nightclub in New Jersey.
I’m not going to try to draw any lessons from this tangle. Others, I’m sure, will be less reticent.
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