The flight attendant pressed her further
Yet another man on yet another flight to Israel makes a woman change her seat because he doesn’t want a filthy whorey woman sitting next to him.
A retired lawyer who fled the Nazis as a child is suing the Israeli national airline El Al for alleged discrimination after being asked to move on a plane when an ultra-Orthodox Jew objected to sitting next to a woman.
Renee Rabinowitz, 81, is being supported by the Israel Religious Action Center, which has campaigned against ultra-Orthodox efforts to enforce the segregation of men and women and to have images of women removed from public hoardings.
You don’t get to “object to” sitting next to people in public accommodations unless they’re something along the lines of roaring drunk or covered in vomit. You don’t get to “object to” sitting next to them simply because they’re a category of human you consider beneath you. That shit needs to stop.
On 2 December last year, Rabinowitz settled into her business class seat on an El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv following a visit to the US to see family. Her seat was one of a pair separated by a screen.
Shortly before the plane doors closed, a passenger who had been allocated the window seat next to Rabinowitz boarded. The middle-aged man, who was wearing ultra-Orthodox garb, called a flight attendant and spoke to him in Hebrew.
Rabinowitz said the flight attendant then offered Rabinowitz what he described as a better seat, one of the central row of three nearer the first class cabin. “I didn’t understand. It wasn’t a better seat,” she said.
Seeing as how she lives in Israel, I bet she did understand, all too well.
She said she initially declined to move, but the flight attendant pressed her further and as the plane was close to taking off, she felt she had no alternative. Using her walking stick, Rabinowitz followed him to the front of the business class section.
“I asked the flight attendant point blank if the man sitting next to me had asked me to be moved, and unabashedly he said yes.”
So it’s that taken for granted that women are filthy and unacceptable.
Back home in Jerusalem, Rabinowitz attended a public meeting at which Anat Hoffman, IRAC’s executive director, spoke about the organisation’s successful campaign to end gender segregation on Israel’s public buses at the demand of the ultra-Orthodox. Since IRAC won a court case on the issue, buses carry prominent notices informing passengers they may sit where they wish.
“Anat said they wanted to launch a similar action in the air. Afterwards I told her what had happened to me,” said Rabinowitz.
Hoffman said: “We kept hearing from women, both Israelis and tourists, that they had been asked to move seats on planes. We were looking for a good case to take up, and then Renee walked in. She’s 81, and a Holocaust survivor – and she was humiliated by Israel’s national airline.”
It’s not a good look, is it. “Excuse me, ma’am, and sorry about the Holocaust and everything, but this gentleman here can’t bear to have you sitting next to him, so I have to ask you to move.” The irony is breath-taking.
IRAC is awaiting El Al’s formal statement of defence, which must be submitted within 30 days of the lawsuit being filed. But in a letter to Rabinowitz’s lawyer, the company insisted there was no gender discrimination on El Al flights.
It said it had investigated the incident, and found that the flight attendant had dealt with Rabinowitz politely and sensitively, making it clear that Rabinowitz was not obliged to move. As a gesture of goodwill, El Al offered Rabinowitz a $200 (£140) voucher towards her next flight. “The money is not the important issue here, it’s the principle,” said Rabinowitz.
That’s even more insulting. Calling it “polite” and “sensitive” to make someone move just because the passenger next to her dislikes the category of human she is is incredibly insulting…especially, sorry to labor the point, from one Jew to another Jew. Offering her a voucher for an offensively small amount is insult 3.
Hoffman described El Al’s acquiescence to demands to move women passengers as “one more way that ultra-Orthodox extremists get away with demands that have nothing to do with Judaism. Humiliating women can in no way qualify as a religious act. It is simply not acceptable.”
In a statement, El Al said it maintained “the highest levels of equal treatment and respect for all passengers. Our employees in the air, on the ground, in Israel and around the globe do all possible to listen to and provide solutions to the concerns or requests from our customers whatever they might be, including seating requests on the airplane.”
So if someone asked to sit next to a gentile? Would El Al employees do all possible to listen to and provide solutions to the request?
“Humiliating women can in no way qualify as a religious act.”
1) There is ample evidence that for many people it can and does.
2) Does this imply that it could become justifiable if it were a religious act?
OK, one more time–why can’t the man sit somewhere else, if it’s such a big deal to him?
Yep. Why didn’t the sensitive polite flight attendant ask the man to move? Surely there is a polite dignified way to tell a man that it is the 21st century.
guest – because it was a worse seat, and he wanted the seat by the window? Which, of course, being a man, he was entitled to, while the woman, not so much.
I’m so sick of this bullshit. If they’re so scared they’ll feel the sudden urge to grab a woman in lust, maybe they should just stay home and not fly. Or ride buses.
I was faced with a similar request on a flight to Kuwait. My response, in very polite words:
http://media.photobucket.com/user/Franny143Cuttie/media/tumblr_m8ba2qAqSM1r1v3cno2_500.gif.html?filters%5Bterm%5D=middle%20finger&filters%5Bprimary%5D=images
@ 3 Claire Ramsey
He’d probably say you’re 37 centuries slow.
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/526875/jewish/The-Jewish-Year.htm
;-)
“Excuse me. I’m terribly sorry, there seems to have been some mistake. I seem to seated next to a Jewish person. I’m Aryan, you see. Surely you can do something? Have a quiet word?”
Well I still don’t get it. Every once in a while I find myself sitting next to someone I’d prefer not to sit next to (someone who stinks, someone who’s eating smelly food, someone who’s playing music too loud)…and I move. Because I’m uncomfortable. It’s my problem, not theirs. (Who am I kidding, I know the answer is ‘because penis’.)
The guy should have been given the following choices.
1) He takes his assigned seat
2) He takes another seat to his liking
3) He gets the hell off the plane.
I’ve often had to sit beside people considered less than desirable… ie very poor personal hygiene.
Equip all airline staff with stout hessian sacks, and rolls of twine.
Any orthodox bloke complaining about being seated next to a woman gets a sack over his head, tied up, and thrown in the hold for the duration of the flight.
It would only happen once.
Things I am curious about: Given that El Al has female flight attendants*. Do the flight attendants self-select so that only male flight attendants deal with the ultra-orthodox passengers, thus avoiding the potential horror of inadvertent contact? (I guess the ultra-orthodox are usually relatively easy to identify visually.) Do they have any flights where there are only female attendants? What do they do in that case?
* See http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/El-Al-slammed-for-new-high-heels-rule-for-flight-attendants-406065 for how El Al treats their women flight attendants, but that’s another story. Actually, perhaps it’s not another story. Both incidents seem to exemplify the attitude that women are *about* their gender, and that should be the first consideration in deciding how they should be regarded and treated.
I can’t understand what would happen if flight attendants refused to accommodate these demands. What is it that compels them to agree? Surely nothing local to the flight; if someone kicks off, they’re off the plane without question. The airline? The airports? The countries?
The captain told her it’s airline policy, so I guess that’s the real question – why on earth is it airline policy?
Exactly. What does the airline have to gain? I doubt it’s really policy.
I’d prefer, personally, not to have to sit next to demanding jerks–bigoted as apparently a required part of their very religion or otherwise–but don’t suppose I can expect airlines to accommodate this preference. I fear numbers alone might make it logistically too complicated…
Still, it’s nice to imagine. Like you could do it during seat selection: aisle, not adjacent to a jerk. Or they could set aside some jerk class seating, curtained off as necessary, just for people making requests like these.
More turbulence ahead…
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/apr/03/air-france-faces-staff-mutiny-in-headscarf-row
I don’t understand. Was the whole business class filled with women. Why couldn’t they have this man switch with another man who was not afraid to sit next to a woman?