Están locos estos Americanos

Acaba de conocerse la noticia de que hace unos días impidieron a una persona embarcar en un avión en NY porque llevaba una camiseta con un texto en árabe:

An Arab human rights activist says he was prevented from boarding a plane at Kennedy International Airport while wearing a T-shirt that said "We will not be silent" in English and Arabic.

The incident happened Aug. 12 when Raed Jarrar was preparing to board a JetBlue flight from Kennedy to Oakland, Calif.

Four officials from JetBlue or from a government agency stopped him at the gate and told him he couldn't get on the plane wearing his shirt, Jarrar said in a telephone interview Wednesday.

One of the officials told him, "Going to an airport with a T-shirt in Arabic script is like going to a bank and wearing a T-shirt that says 'I'm a robber.'" he said.

Jenny Dervin, a spokeswoman for JetBlue, acknowledged that the dispute occurred and said the airline was investigating it.

[...]

Jarrar, who directs the Iraq project for Global Exchange, a San Francisco-based human rights organization, said he asked what law he was breaking by wearing the shirt. The officials didn't answer, he said, but suggested that he turn the shirt inside out.

[...]

In the end, the officials gave Jarrar another shirt to put over the offending T-shirt and he put it on rather than miss his flight.

En este blog dan una posible explicación sobre por qué no le dejaron embarcar hasta que se cubrió la camiseta:

[...] the only sense that I can make of this is that the officials concerned attributed to the words some sort of magical power that could be contained by covering them up. There have been societies in which people held such beliefs, but I wasn't aware that the United States in the 21st century was among them.