Raed Jarrar says he was forced to remove a T-shirt with the words “We will not be silent” in both Arabic and English before boarding a Jet Blue flight from New York to California earlier this month. According to a BBC report, Jarrar was told “a number of passengers had complained about his T-shirt—apparently concerned at what the Arabic phrase meant—and asked him to remove it.” Jarrar first refused, then, according to his blog post about the incident, he wore a grey T-shirt with the words “New York” bought for him by a Jet Blue representative. 

“I feel very sad that my personal freedom was taken away like this,” he writes. “I grew up under authoritarian governments in the Middle East, and one of the reasons I chose to move to the US was that I don’t want an officer to make me change my T-shirt. I will pursue this incident today through a Constitutional rights organization, and I am sure we will meet soon.”

Jarrar may not have any recourse. As we mentioned last year when Lorrie Heasley was booted from a Southwest flight for wearing a T-shirt with images of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice on it that carried a slightly different version of the film title, “Meet the Fockers,” constitutional law experts say that “as private companies, airlines are within their rights” to determine what’s offensive.

UPDATE: 1 p.m. ET, Sept. 1: Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Raed Jarrar about the incident, and she says she’s been hearing from many listeners who are showing their support for him: “Well, since our interview with Raed, major newspapers and corporate TV networks in the United States and around the world have picked up this story. Now, more and more people are putting on the ‘We Will Not Be Silent’ t-shirts in solidarity when they travel.”

One of the travelers who did so is Laurie Arbeiter, one of the original organizers of the “We Will Not Be Silent” T-shirt campaign. Goodman interviewed her, too, about her experience flying with a T-shirt with the slogan in question:

AMY GOODMAN: So you just flew a few days ago. What happened?

LAURIE ARBEITER: Well, we went to the airport. We met and picked up our tickets. And then we proceeded to the gate. At times, we were actually separated. We dispersed. We were, you know—and then came back together to go through security. There was no incident, actually. We did not get stopped. We went to the gate. We waited there, and we boarded the plane. And the irony is that we were actually assigned to the seat that Raed was moved to, after he was moved out of the seat that he had been assigned.

Read the entire interview with Arbeiter at Democracy Now.

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* Southwest Airlines Boots Passenger for “Fockers” Shirt