The United Airlines case, and letting the Wookie win

Last updated on: June 6, 2015 at 10:28 am by Jane the Actuary

The United Airlines case, and letting the Wookie win 2015-06-06T10:28:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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You guys have heard about this, right? A woman wearing a headscarf claims discrimination because she wasn’t given an unopened can of pop on a United flight, and starts a twitter campaign for re-education for UAL staff. The flight attendant in question has not been fired per se, but according to UAL, “she will no longer serve United customers.”

Here’s the latest: a link to The Gateway Pundit (don’t read the comments), as linked to by Elizabeth Price Foley at instapundit, both of whom cite a commenter at FlyerTalk, who claims that he was an eyewitness, and that the woman in question made the whole thing up, finding insult in not being given a Coke Zero rather than a Diet Coke, and then only being offered a partial can, prepoured, due to a shortage. A commenter also links to a Weasel Zipper post which asserts that the woman made further over-the-top claims (that the pilot apologized for his white privilege) which she later scrubbed, presumably recognizing that they diminished her credibility. Here’s another link, to Pamela Geller’s website, which claims that the initial United statement, since deleted, was consistent with the anonymous commenter’s story, saying that the flight attendant “attempted several times to accommodate Ms. Ahmad’s beverage request.”

So: what do you do with this, how do you process this story?

The Federalist had a piece the other day, “Don’t Let the Wookie Win,” by Varad Mehta. The central conceit of the article is that Han Solo advised C3PO to “let the Wookie win” at their chess-like game on the Millennium Falcon, because Wookies are known to “pull people’s arms out of their sockets when they lose.”

Faced with an opponent who will do anything to prevail in a contest to whose outcome you are indifferent, you should give in. You will lose nothing, as you stood to gain nothing.

But, Mehta says, the problem is that, in the end,

as a strategy for defending basic freedoms it is ignoble and self-defeating. The problem with letting the Wookiee win is that eventually he insists that you lose forever.

so that, bottom line, we ought not be indifferent to the outcome, because, when each individual instance of letting the Wookie win, is added together, it becomes a surrender of freedom.

Sure sounds like UAL has indeed engaged in LTWW, taking the easy way out to avoid bad publicity. But I’m still mystified at this whole story. It is, I suppose, not at the level of the racist graffiti or noose hoaxes (that is, where it turns out that the “victim” had done this him/herself, to promote the cause), but the woman clearly has an agenda in using what was either a misunderstanding/miscommunication, at worst, to gain attention.

According to The Guardian,

“I asked United to recognize it as an act of discrimination,” Ahmad said, “my hope was they would say, ‘You know what, this should have never happened and here’s what we are going to do to make sure this never happens to anyone again.’”

But that doesn’t look to be happening, leading Ahmad and her supporters to continue their boycott of United.

According to Ahmad – who filed a formal complaint with United Airlines after exiting the plane with the pilot escorting her to customer service – there will be an investigation into her allegations, but the airline has not yet announced any plans to discuss issues around potential discrimination on their flight.

“They’re basically failing to recognize the humiliation that happened to me,” she told the Guardian. “So I am going to look into options to ensure that of course this type of discrimination doesn’t happen again. Not to minorities, not to anybody else.”

What does she want? Any such organization already has massive amounts of Cultural Sensitivity Training — does she want more? Does she want the FAA to mandate that Muslim advocacy groups be given contracts to provide such training? Does she want to claim money damages, or set in motion a process for claiming them? Or is this just a part of her career, needing to continue to push the narrative of injustices that Muslims face, in a continual manner, always alert for some bit of material, no different than a blogger looking for something that people will read? Has she conditioned herself to seeing injustice at every turn?

Heck, maybe this is Performance Art.

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