It’s Hajj season. In case you are unfamiliar with the concept, Hajj means pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia — a journey all Muslims are expected to make once in their lifetime. Approximately 20,000 US Muslims will make the trip to Islam’s holiest site this year. So as not to offend any of this small majority of holiday travelers, all 45,000 TSA screeners have undergone ‘Hajj sensitivity training.’

Rich Stevens, TSA’s Deputy Federal Security Director in Tampa, told the St. Petersburg Times “we don’t anticipate there will be any problems.” Ahmed Bedier, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ (CAIR) from the Tampa branch told the paper, “Men also have to shave or cut their hair before they leave the pilgrimage. Some may grow a beard. These changes may cause people’s appearances to differ from passports or ID cards, but they shouldn’t make security officials nervous.”
To make sure federal agents are not uncomfortable with these hajj rituals and others, CAIR has been instructing federal officials in the aviation domain how to do their jobs. Also from the St. Petersberg Times:

CAIR officials gave airport police and FBI, Transportation Security Administration, Homeland Security Department and customs officials a lesson about the pilgrimage and what they can expect from returning Muslims.

The meeting was part of CAIR’s nationwide initiative following the removal of six imams from a US Airways flight in Minneapolis in November after their prayer, conversation and behavior worried flight attendants and passengers. Federal officials questioned the men and released them without charges.

If you missed the flying imam controversy, read Debra Burlingame’s “On a Wing and a Prayer,” from The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Page. It sums things up. Here’s an excerpt:

In five years since the 9/11 attacks, U.S. commercial carriers have transported approximately 2.9 billion domestic and international passengers. It is a testament to the flying public, but, most of all, to the flight crews who put those planes into the air and who daily devote themselves to the safety and well-being of their passengers, that they have refused to succumb to ethnic hatred, religious intolerance or irrational fear on those millions of flights. But they have not forgotten the sight of a 200,000-pound aircraft slicing through heavy steel and concrete as easily as a knife through butter.

They still remember the voices of men and women in the prime of their lives saying final goodbyes, people who just moments earlier set down their coffee and looked out the window to a beautiful new morning. Today, when travelers and flight crews arrive at the airport, all the overheated rhetoric of the civil rights absolutists, all the empty claims of government career bureaucrats, all the disingenuous promises of the election-focused politicians just fall away. They have families. They have responsibilities. To them, this is not a game or a cause. This is real life.

CAIR’s national spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, might have missed the article. CAIR has a cause and continues to push forth its relentless agenda: that the needs of a few are greater than the needs of many. In a December 27 press release Hopper stated, “We welcome the fact that airport security officers nationwide will now be better informed about Islamic traditions relating to Hajj. This proactive effort on the part of the Transportation Security Administration demonstrates that there is no contradiction between the need to maintain airline safety and security and the duty to protect the religious and civil rights of airline passengers.”

But when you consider that 45,000 federal employees have been trained to meet the needs of 20,000 travelers, there is a contradiction at hand. And at what cost?

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