Tefillin prayer scare on US Airways

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/01/21/2010-01-21_jewish_teens_tefillin_sets_off_bomb_scare_that_diverts_us_airways_flight_from_la.html

Jewish teen's tefillin sets off bomb scare that diverts US Airways flight from LaGuardia.

This is the kind of shit that pisses me off.

How many people were inconvenienced because one fucking Jew wanted to pray on a god damned plane? On a plane - where there are two inches between you and your seatmate.

He should have gone into the bathroom and closed the door and prayed privately -- and not subjected the rest of the passengers with his primitive horseshit.

What will become of airport security now? Is every $9/hr. TSA security person expected to learn the rituals and props from every single religion in order to avoid mistakenly assuming that a person is a terrorist when they are only doing some form of generational superstition?

I wish these orthodox Jews would step back from themselves and see what they look like to the rest of the world.

Their tefillin consists of a leather binding which you wrap around your arm several times until the blood stops flowing. There is a small box which is attached to the binding which has to lay on the bicep a certain way. You MUST wrap the binding around your arm 7 times.

You are required to say an incantation at this point and not speak to anyone until the job of binding is complete.

They have another leather binding in their prop kit with contains a box that wraps around your forehead and the little box MUST stick out of the top of your head prominently like a horn.

Now they go back to the binding on the arm. -- All in it's proper order, you know. Everything must be done in the strictest of fashion because we all know that god loves the stupid details.

The process continues by now starting to cut off the blood flow at the hand too. http://www.davening.net/tefillin.html%20

First, bring the strap (the one wrapped around the arm 7 times) around and down to the middle finger and around the upper half of the middle finger. Then wrap the strap twice around the lower part of the middle finger.

Inside these little boxes contain some magic words from their Torah. Then they don the tallis --which is a shroud with fringes. It looks ratty and tattered and basically umm -- primitive.

Then the rocking and chanting starts.

Here we have a bunch of supposed adults playing dress-up, talking and praying to their imaginary friend, saying some magical words, from a magical scroll, using their magical (props) phylacteries, taking care to wrap it around their arms a magical 7 times and we are supposed to tolerate this nonsense.

No. I won't. If I was on that plane and a Jew whipped out his magic tefillin prop kit, I would grab it from him and tell him that we do not behave in that manner in public. Be shameful and do your primitive rituals privately in the bathroom where everybody takes a shit.