Terrorist threats are not a joke

Georgia woman was right to report what she heard at restaurant to police

By: collins ezeanyim

Posted: 9/30/02

It is perhaps the most serious case of "he said, she said" the nation has ever known. A Georgia woman, Eunice Stone, claims to have heard three men plotting an attack of equal or greater magnitude than Sept. 11. According to CNN, one of the three men in question, medical student Ayman Gheith, says the woman discriminated against him because he was Muslim and falsified her story. Unfortunately for Gheith and his fellow medical students, Kambiz Butt and Omer Choudhary, Stone must be given the benefit of the doubt because the nation is at an unprecedented level of alert. She was correct in reporting the men to the authorities and hopefully more Americans will have the courage to do the same if faced with a similar situation.

According to Houston Chronicle News Services, on Sept. 12, Stone sat down to eat breakfast with her son at a Shoney's Restaurant in Calhoun, Ga. What was supposed to be a relaxing meal turned alarming when Stone overheard Gheith, Butt and Choudhary - all of Middle-Eastern descent - joke about Sept. 11. According to the Houston Chronicle article, their comments included, "If they mourn Sept. 11, what will they think about Sept. 13?"

Instead of dismissing these comments as off-hand remarks, Stone took wrote down the license plate numbers of these men and alerted the Georgia State Patrol. The three medical students were tracked down at a bend in Interstate 75 near Naples, Fla., known as Alligator Alley, according to The Miami Herald. Their car was searched and they were later released.

Some critics say Stone's actions will only feed the nation's paranoia and that the three men were treated unfairly. For example, Matt Drudge said on his Sept. 15 radio show, "We owe these guys an apology." But Stone did not act rashly in reporting the men. If anything, she actually hesitated to take any action. She was quoted by Houston Chronicle News Services as saying, "At first, you know, I just went ahead with my breakfast."

Furthermore, her story has remained consistent while accounts of what the three men did have vacillated wildly. Salon.com reports that police first thought the men started joking about terrorist plots after receiving a dirty look from a customer in the restaurant. The men later told CNN that their comments about "bringing it down" were in reference to bringing a car down to Florida and not to blowing up a building as Stone suspected. The men have claimed they never said anything about Sept. 11 or Sept. 13.

According to the Houston Chronicle article, relatives of the three men have claimed just about everyone involved in the incident - including Stone, law enforcement officers and even the media - of being prejudiced against Muslims. Other detractors of Stone's actions agree. "If the people in the next booth had been named Bubba, Leroy and Goober, would she still have called the police?" wrote one reader to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Stone's critics do raise a legitimate concern about ethnic profiling. Unfortunately, there have been other cases since Sept. 11 in which innocent people have been discriminated against because they were or appeared to be Muslim. For example, Michael Dasrath claims to have been thrown off a Continental Airlines flight because a female passenger reported that he and two other "brown-skinned men" were - in her words - "acting suspiciously," according to a statement released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). In this case, the reporting passenger was clearly acting out of bigotry. She couldn't even specify the ethnicities of the men she had thrown off the plane or any of their supposed "suspicious" actions. But Stone has been very specific about why she alerted the authorities of the three medical students so her actions most likely were not born out of a hatred for Muslims.

The anger expressed by supporters of Gheith, Butt and Choudhary can be understood, but they must understand that the nation's chance of preventing another Sept. 11 may depend on people like Eunice Stone roaming America's streets and restaurants.