The Council on American Islamic Relations set up a Grievance Theater Hotline to solicit complaints about airlines from Muslims traveling to Mecca for the hajj pilgrimage.

Apparently, the hotline served its purpose. The next episode of the grievance theater will feature 40 Muslims who showed up 20 minutes before their flight departed.

Thousands of American Muslims returned to Michigan this month exhausted in body but revitalized in spirit after performing the hajj, a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that is a religious duty.

But not all travelers had an easy time getting home. The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is expected to hold a news conference today regarding the treatment of 40 American Muslim pilgrims - some from Canton, Dearborn and Dearborn Heights - who were allegedly denied passage on a flight to Detroit.

The men were reportedly denied boarding on Northwest Airlines Flight 51 from Germany on Jan. 7. CAIR-Michigan is asking the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate the incident.

Northwest spokesman Roman Blahoski said Monday that the passengers were denied boarding because they arrived for the flight just 20 minutes before departure, a violation of airline and governmental regulations.

“These passengers did not meet the standard check-in deadline of 60 minutes or onboard deadline of 20 minutes,” he said. “It’s nothing beyond that.”

Dawud Walid, CAIR-Michigan’s executive director, declined to provide details and said he would address Northwest’s response during a news conference at 9:30 a.m. today at the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn.

More on this latest ridiculous victimhood claim, at the Detroit Free Press: Muslims say they were profiled by airline.

Claiming they were unfairly profiled, a group of Michigan Muslims said today that they were not allowed to board a flight to Detroit while returning home from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia.

At a news conference this morning at a mosque in Dearborn, they said they were unfairly treated because of their religion and background.

On Jan. 7, a group of Muslims who were largely Lebanese-American Shi’ites had landed in Germany and were going to take a connecting flight to Detroit. Northwest allowed some of them on the flight, but barred about 40 of them, the pilgrims said.

“Probably they were afraid of 40 Muslims on one flight,” said Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini, head of the Islamic Center of America, a Shi’ite mosque in Dearborn.

Al-Qazwini, who was part of the group, said that he and other Muslims have had profiling problems before with Northwest Airlines.

Northwest officials, though, maintain that the passengers were not allowed on the flight because they were late.

Notice how both of the articles above are written by Arab reporters, openly sympathetic to CAIR.

Debbie Schlussel points out that Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini just happens to be a close friend of Hizballah spiritual leader and Specially Designated Global Terrorist, Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah—the man who gave the fatwa okaying the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, murdering over 241 Americans.

UPDATE at 1/17/07 8:53:55 am:

And to make things much worse, the FBI and the TSA appear to be completely in CAIR’s pocket: Feds Defend Partnership With Islamic Group Under Scrutiny.

CAIR works on “sensitivity training” projects and outreach programs with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and other agencies. That’s a situation some believe should change.

“We wish the federal government was more aggressive at looking into CAIR, or at least stop working with them and providing them a platform,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group in Washington.

“CAIR is not a legitimate … civil rights organization,” Fitton said in an interview. “The federal government needs to stop treating it as if it is.”

The TSA recently reproduced on its own official website an unedited CAIR press release. In the release, CAIR praised the TSA for providing sensitivity training to airport workers ahead of the Hajj, or the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Judicial Watch and others criticized the TSA’s publication of the press release, arguing that taxpayer dollars were being misused to subsidize the group’s public relations message.

TSA spokeswoman Amy Kudwa told Cybercast News Service the posting of the unedited release had been a mistake, resulting from “a miscommunication with technical personnel.”

“Hajj training is a policy we’ve had in place for some time,” Kudwa said. “This is not a new policy.” For example, U.S. airport security staff were advised on how to explain the rules on carrying liquids or gels to Muslim travelers who brought holy water back from Mecca, she added. …

CAIR is proud of its work with the government, said the group’s spokesman Ibraham Hooper.

“I can’t tell you the number of times we have done sensitivity training when we’ve worked with the TSA, the DHS,” Hooper told Cybercast News Service. “I can’t keep up with the number of meetings we’ve had with the FBI. They never bring these [terrorism] issues up. They know who we are, and they know what we do.”

As for the CAIR statement reproduced on the TSA website, Hooper explained that the federal agency simply informed its employees about Islamic traditions in a bid to avoid any “unfortunate incident.”

Working with CAIR is an important part of the counter-terrorism campaign, said FBI spokesman Bill Carter.

“Law enforcement doesn’t operate in a vacuum,” Carter told Cybercast News Service. “The FBI works with them to investigate civil rights matters and to ask for their cooperation in fighting the war on terror at home.

“There are elements in any group that might be a concern,” Carter added. “You could say that about every group. Just because some are criminals doesn’t mean everyone is a criminal.”

Previous LGF posts featuring Imam Hassan Al-Qazwini:
US Muslims Seething Over Mosque Bombing
Shi’ites Seethe, Threaten Further Seething

UPDATE at 1/17/07 11:34:50 am:

More info about the Al-Qazwini family at Militant Islam Monitor: Nazi - Islamist Hatefest -Al Qazwini & Co. in Boca Raton.