Some people are pointing out the similarities and contrast with the "Shoney's incident" in September 2002:
Terror Scare in Florida: False Alarm, but Televised
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Published: September 14, 2002
MIAMI, Sept. 13 — An Interstate highway was sealed off, three men of Middle Eastern descent were detained for more than 17 hours and their cars were searched for explosives, all under the eyes of a media horde today, after a woman said she had overheard the men talk of a terrorist attack over breakfast at a restaurant on Thursday.
But the three men proved to be medical students on their way to a hospital here, there were no explosives in their cars, and the authorities said their plotting may have been the work of smart alecks, not fanatics.
As law enforcement officials and viewers collectively exhaled late this afternoon, the day's deadly seriousness gave way to comic relief: the three men were released without being charged, but as they resumed their journey here news helicopters chased them, transmitting live images of their trip to Miami over CNN.
The incident left domestic security officials praising the woman, Eunice Stone of Cartersville, Ga., for reporting her suspicions and jotting down the men's license plate numbers and car descriptions after overhearing them at a Shoney's restaurant in Calhoun, Ga. They also praised one another for responding quickly, and overwhelmingly, to what had thankfully been only a false alarm.
At a time when citizens, police and news organizations seemed on a hair trigger over the Sept. 11 anniversary and Tuesday's decision by the Bush administration to increase the terror alert warning level to code orange, more than 100 officers from at least a score of agencies, and an equal number of news media personnel, had converged on a barren stretch of the highway through the Florida Everglades known as Alligator Alley.
"We had a very significant drill," said the Collier County sheriff, Don Hunter.
After their release, the three drove to a rest stop, where they said they were medical students heading here for training and denied making any comments or jokes about terrorism.
Meanwhile, relatives of one of the three men held a news conference at an Islamic center in Palos Hills, Ill., a Chicago suburb, to denounce Ms. Stone as a racist, and to decry law enforcement officials for having jumped to conclusions and overreacted.
The authorities did not release the three men's names today, but relatives and other officials identified two of the three as Ashmad Butt, of Orland Park, Ill., and Ayman A. Gheith, 27, of Worth, Ill. They and their companion apparently had completed at least two years of study at Ross University School of Medicine on the Caribbean island of Dominica. Law enforcement officials said one of the three men was a United States citizen by birth, another was a naturalized citizen and a third was a foreign national in the United States on a valid student visa.
The school's dean for clinical sciences, Dr. Nancy Perri, said tonight that she did not know which students were involved and was barred by privacy laws from divulging their names if she did.
The three students were on their way from Illinois in two cars to begin nine-week rotations on Monday at Larkin Community Hospital in South Miami, a 112-bed hospital where 6 to 12 Ross students receive training at a time, school officials said.
Mr. Gheith's sister, Hana Gheith, said she was also a student at Ross and had planned join him on Sunday.
"Unfortunately, they stopped in a restaurant in Georgia," Ms. Gheith said.
At the restaurant, a Shoney's off Interstate 75, the three were seated next to Ms. Stone and her son, who sat down to breakfast sometime around 11 a.m. on Thursday. Ms. Stone said she became alarmed at what she overheard from the next booth. She recounted in at least two broadcast interviews that she heard the three men "laughing about 9/11."
"At first, you know, I just went ahead with my breakfast," she said. "But they were laughing. And I have very good hearing." Recounting the snippets of conversation she picked up, Ms. Stone said she heard one of the men say, "If they mourn Sept. 11, what will they think about Sept. 13?"
A moment later, she said, one of the men asked, "Do you think that will bring it down?"
"Well, if that doesn't bring it down, I have contacts to bring it down," Ms. Stone said another man replied.
"To me, that meant they were planning to blow up something," Ms. Stone told a radio interviewer.
Ms. Stone, who said she was surprised to hear the three speaking in perfect American accents, said that when they left, she grabbed a crayon, followed them out and wrote down their license plate numbers and descriptions of their cars.
She then called the Georgia State Patrol to report what she had heard, and a nationwide alert was issued by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
By early this morning, the three men had reached the bend in I-75 east of Naples, Fla., where it heads east through the Everglades. But one of the two cars ran through a tollbooth, the authorities said, and a police officer chased the car. After eight miles, the officer pulled over the car, and the second vehicle stopped as well.
That stop, at nearly 2 a.m., triggered a tremendous law enforcement response, especially after bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if both cars contained explosives. Exhaustive searches and even swabbing of surfaces in the cars, completed many hours later, showed no traces of explosive materials.
But officials insisted that the response had been so exaggerated at least in part because the three men did not cooperate with their interrogators, refusing to answer even basic questions and at times provided false information. The investigation was also extended because of confusion over the men's licenses, all of which proved in good order.
Shortly before the men were released, officials said that they were not being charged but that the matter would continue to be pursued as a possible hoax.
"We're looking into seeing what laws might be applicable," said John Bankhead, the director of public affairs for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He added, "These people are going to learn a lesson."
Back in Chicago, where Mr. Gheith and his two companions had packed their belongings and left on Monday or Tuesday, relatives angrily accused Ms. Stone, law enforcement officials and the news media of acting rashly out of prejudice against Muslims.
"Me and my brother and my whole family are just as American as everyone else," said Abdallah Gheith, 18. "My father passed away three years ago, and since then my brother has taken care of the family. We have no source of income right now. We're waiting on him to finish medical school."
Tonight, Ms. Stone could not be reached for comment. Outside her home in Cartersville, where a tattered American flag adorns the front garden, her husband, Billy Ray Stone, shooed a reporter away, saying: "I think my wife did the right thing. That's what they ask people to do. These guys say it was a joke? It was a sick joke. I praise her."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/14/national/14THRE.html
And Peggy Noonan's response in the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal:
Hippocratic Oafs
Muslims demand sensitivity. They ought to show some too.
The Wall Street Journal: September 20, 2002
The story is over. It’s yesterday’s headline.
Everyone involved has begun to recede back into normal life insofar as they had normal lives. But before it becomes just another strange memory of 2002, a worthy wave goodbye.
Eunice Stone of Georgia is reportedly recovering from the chest pains that led her to check herself into a local hospital. The diagnosis was stress. The three young Muslim men with whom she had her now-famous encounter have reportedly announced they will not sue her, which is certainly gracious of them.
I wasn’t there, but I listened to everyone who spoke of it and watched the story closely. And it’s not hard to imagine what probably happened that day at Shoney’s.
Three young Mulsim men walk into the middle-class chain restaurant in a Georgia town. They are dressed in what customer Eunice Stone apparently understood to be Mideastern dress. As for Sikh, Saudi, whatever, she probably didn’t know. She probably knew as much about Muslim culture as the three young Muslim men knew about American Indian culture. Which is to say: probably nothing.
So they’re all in a small southern town, at a local chain restaurant, and when the three young Muslim males walk in, the locals—Southerners, Americans, neighbors—look at them. Maybe hard. Maybe up and down. Who are those guys?
And here we might ask: Who are the Southerners? They are likely, being Southerners, Americans who take a rather protective and even loving interest in their country. They are painfully aware that America had, just one year before, been brutally attacked by groups of people who were young Muslim males. They left 3,000 dead—innocent people, civilians, young people just starting out. It grieved a great country. It grieved them.
The Southerners know, for they keep a close eye on the news, that there are now in our country cells of young Muslim males loyal not to the United States but to the grievances and leadership of terror masters. They mean us ill. A bunch of men allegedly meeting this description were arrested last week in Buffalo, N.Y. More are said to be lying low in Michigan, Florida, New Jersey and other states. They move among us with confidence, taking advantage of the freedoms we guarantee, and taking advantage too of our cultural reluctance to jump to conclusions based on a person’s look or sex or ethnicity.
* * *
So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.
And now we wish we’d been less friendly, less trusting, less lazy or frightened. We wish we’d been skeptical. Hell, we’re the only nation on earth that is now nostalgic for paranoia.
But it’s the anniversary of Sept. 11, and now we’re trying to be alert, to look out for things.
So the Southerners eyeball the young Muslim males, and the young Muslim males feel the vibe.
And they don’t like it. They resent it.
Here they had two clear choices: Try to understand the emotions of the people around them—people who’ve been bruised, who’ve seen their country take a roundhouse right from history—and choose to be polite and friendly. The young Muslim males could smile and nod, for instance. This probably would have gone far in making progress between peoples, for one thing we’ve all read about the terrorists of Sept. 11 is that they never bothered to be nice. They tended to treat the Americans with whom they interacted with Sullen Dead Face—the inexpressive look young men put on so it will be hard for you to read them. Because they don’t want to be read. Because they want to convey an air of some menace.
They could have introduced themselves to the waitress, mentioned they’re on their way to medical school. They could have been quiet, minded their business, chatted softly.
But they didn’t bother to be nice. They wanted things on their terms.
So they took option two.
They sensed the questioning within the gazes, and they thought it would be amusing to show these stupid and uneducated Southern people, these dumb crackers, these yokels, who was boss. You think we’re bad guys? We’ll show you bad guys.
And so one of them or a few of them said the things Eunice Stone says she overheard. Talk about explosions, references to Sept. 11, talk about how Sept. 13 will be even bigger.
And Ms. Stone, alarmed, put herself on the line. She called the police and told them what she’d heard. She was interviewed by them repeatedly and exhaustively. She did everything she could to see that the young Muslim males were stopped.
The young Muslim males took off in their cars, driving south. They were stopped in Florida, where police closed a highway for an entire day as robots searched their car. The young Muslim men, the police said, were not entirely cooperative. They had attitude. Certainly in their interviews after they were released, after nothing was found in their cars, they displayed plenty of attitude. They were an unsympathetic bunch, in both ways. They showed scant sympathy for those they’d inconvenienced and alarmed, and they also inspired no sympathy for their plight. Later, a sister of one of the young men went on CNN to declare that this was the South, and you know how the South is: “It has a reputation of racism.”
I thought, as I watched this: It has a reputation for patriotism, too. It’s why Southern men and women join the armed forces in such high numbers, and why, if the sister were ever attacked by a terrorist, they’d risk their lives to save her sorry, sanctimonious little . . . Well, as I watched I got a little mad.
The South’s reputation for patriotism may be why Eunice Stone put herself on the line, and wound up overwhelmed by insults and unwanted fame, in the hospital, and ultimately being patronized—We won’t sue you—by the three young Muslim males.
* * *
But they were right about one thing, and it’s a big thing. This really does appear to have been a story about bigotry.
There was someone who was prejudiced, who made assumptions based on newspaper reports and urban legends; there was someone who didn’t like “the other” and assumed bad things about them; there was someone who was insensitive, lacking in compassion and aggressive.
And it wasn’t Eunice Stone. It was the three young Muslim males, the young would-be doctors, the college-educated men, who thought they’d have some fun with their social, intellectual and moral inferiors.
* * *
And now it’s over. The hospital they said they were on their way to visit for training told them to go elsewhere. Good hospital. Florida’s Gov. Jeb Bush privately called Ms. Stone and told her he thought she’d done the right thing. Good governor. The media, which covered the story wall to wall, did not indulge in a reflexive “poor minority person is abused by bullying whites” narrative. They questioned the men closely, and sometimes sharply. And Ms. Stone is said to be recuperating at home. May she recover fully, quickly and with the knowledge that the vast majority of Americans understand what she did and why, and appreciate it.
As for the three Muslim males, they plan to continue their studies. Perhaps they could take a course in bias reduction. It would be nice if they were assigned a paper that answers the question: “Why might a people who had just been attacked by young Muslim males feel a heightened sensitivity and awareness in the presence of young Muslim males? Discuss.”
Perhaps they could learn from Hippocrates, the father of medicine, whose advice to young doctors was timeless and is applicable here: “First, do no harm.”
So that's progress I guess, 13 years ago when Muslims are falsely accused of a bomb plot by racist as fuck southerners, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation says they are going to "looking into seeing what laws might be applicable" to " pursue as a possible hoax" in order to "teach these people a lesson" (to not be falsely accused, apparently), and the Wall Street Journal publishes an OP-ED by the queen shrill harpy bitch Peggy Noonan laying 100% of the blame at the falsely accused muslims feet.
Nowadays when a muslim is falsely accused of a bomb plot, the police dept backs off on their threat to charge the kid with a bomb hoax after an outcry on social media, and then he gets invited to the white house by the president.
Now if only racist southerners stop falsely accusing muslims of bomb plots, and LEOs could stop trying to charge them with bomb hoaxes when it turns out the muslims were falsely accused, we'd be golden!
I love it when the President shows he has a spine.
