Monday, January 22, 2007

T-shirt of Terror!

An amusing A frightening story on the BBC website. A man wearing a t-shirt with "an image of President George W Bush, along with the slogan "World's Number One Terrorist"" was barred from boarding a Quantas flight. Apparently, "Mr Jasson was ordered to remove the T-shirt after being told it was a security threat and an item which might cause offence to other passengers".

That's quite interesting. Apparently, the t-shirt was a security threat. I'm quite curious as to how they arrived at that conclusion. Is the t-shirt going to subliminally trigger some kind of impulse in other passengers, turn them into zombies, and cause them to rip apart the plane?

How did they arrive at the conclusion that it would cause offence to other passengers? How many passengers have to be offended for something to be deemed offensive? Did anyone complain? If he had worn a similar t-shirt with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's picture emblazoned on it instead, would he have been barred from boarding the plane? If so, good for them, at least then they'd deserve kudos for consistency when applying stupid policies.

As far as can be gathered from the article, no law has been broken by Mr. Jasson. In fact, he is threatening to take legal action. Here's hoping he succeeds. After all, freedom of speech isn't supposed to arbitrarily stop when you say something people don't like to hear. Right?

2 comments:

sanity index said...

Well, I happen to agree that George W. Bush is some type of terrorist, but the reason why they barred him from the plane is because the shirt had a hidden bomb in it.

I'm only semi-joking.

It is a crazy world out there, but some people just need to chill and stop being so over-sensitive!

Antimatter said...

Or maybe they thought he had a bomb in his ribcage? :D

Haha, when someone figures out how to make explosive t-shirts, will they require all passengers to wear uniforms that are available for purchase after checking in? Fantastic!