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**Bengal_Tiger** · 09-02-2011, 07:56 PM

Muslim Headscarves Start Fight At New York Amusement Park

by Justin Fenner | 10:16 am, September 1st, 2011
Fifteen people were arrested after a brawl at a New York amusement park that started when a group of Muslim women wearing traditional headscarves were told they wouldn’t be allowed on certain rides.
Some 3,000 members of the Muslim Society of New York went to the Rye Playland on Tuesday to celebrate the end of Ramadan, and the park says it told the trip’s organizers beforehand that women who wore hijabs or other head coverings wouldn’t be allowed on a number of rides because the scarves posed a safety risk.
Still, some women wearing those scarves must not have been told about the risk, because some of them tried to get on the rides anyway. When they were stopped and told they would need to remove a garment they wear out of religious conviction to ride rides they’d already paid for, a group of them decided to talk with management.
Ola Salem, a 17-year-old girl who was at the park, told The Westchester Journal News that the manager they spoke with were so disrespectful that she and a group of women decided to leave. As they walked out, so did a number of other Muslims. “By the time we got to the entrance, it was about 150 Muslims. We were at the entrance, and all of a sudden the rangers with the blue shirts, one pushed a lady. And she pushed him back. And all of a sudden a guy just jumps in, I guess he was related to her, and then the rangers just go out of control. They take out their batons and they start hitting people.”
A cell-phone video taken at the park shows a group of law enforcement officers huddled over what the man who shot it says was the first woman to be attacked. Other people at the park complained that the officers beat them unnecessarily.
Westchester Deputy Parks Commissioner Peter Tartaglia told The New York Post that the rule would apply to anything that covers the head. “Depending on the ride, it can become a projectile that hurts someone else, or it could strangle you if it got caught on something,” he says. But Salem says she’s never seen that rule enforced — she went to the same park earlier this year with a considerably smaller group of friends and says she had no trouble getting on rides wearing her headscarf. In fact, she says she’s never been prevented from riding rides at other parks because of her scarf.
Rules aren’t worth much when they’re only applied selectively, so why would Rye Playland choose this week to enforce the head covering guideline? If they were really as concerned for their patrons’ safety as they say they are, the park’s operators would have applied that rule every single day. But on this day, the park saw the incoming of Muslim women wearing scarves as a concern to be dealt with instead of what it really was: people celebrating a holiday.

http://www.styleite.com/media/muslim-amusement-park-fight/

**Bengal_Tiger** · 09-02-2011, 08:08 PM

Muslim Leaders Criticize Police Response to Scuffle
By DAN BILEFSKY

Published: August 31, 2011

Muslim civil rights leaders on Wednesday accused the authorities of using excessive force after a Westchester County amusement park’s restrictions on head coverings provoked a scuffle a day earlier that led to the arrest of 15 people.

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Tara Abadir

A woman was restrained on Tuesday when an altercation broke out at Playland amusement park in Rye, N.Y., over restrictions on head wear.

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Suzy Allman for The New York Times

State, county and city authorities responded to the disturbance.

About 3,000 visitors from a Muslim tour group were at Playland park in Rye on Tuesday afternoon celebrating the end of Ramadan when a dispute erupted after women wearing traditional hijabs, or head scarves, were told they could not wear them on certain rides, for safety reasons.
Among the rides that headwear is prohibited on is the Dragon Coaster, on which riders plunge 128 feet before being hurled into the mouth of a smoke-emitting dragon. However, headwear, including the hijab, is allowed on the Double Shot, in which passengers, harnessed in cars, are rocketed up an 85-foot tower in less than two seconds before being shot back down at a nausea-inducing force of what the park says is “negative-one G.”
Park officials said Wednesday that the women were offered admission refunds, but that an altercation ensued when clutches of displeased visitors became agitated and began to argue among themselves and then with park officials, including two rangers who were hospitalized with injuries.
Peter Tartaglia, deputy commissioner of the County Parks Department, said that two people were charged with assault and that 13 were charged with disorderly conduct. All had been released by Tuesday night.
Mr. Tartaglia said the Muslim American Society of New York, which organized the outing, had been warned of the headwear rule, which he said was a safety precaution to ensure that items like caps and head scarves did not get entangled in mechanical parts. On Playland’s Web site, he noted, rides that allow what the park calls headgear are clearly indicated with the letter H.
“This is all about safety, not about religion,” he said.
Mr. Tartaglia recalled an April 2010 episode in Sydney, Australia, in which a 26-year-old mother wearing a hijab was strangled after her head scarf became tangled in the wheel axle of a go-kart. In another incident, in Buena Park, Calif., in 2000, two dozen people were stranded on a roller coaster for about three hours after a rider’s jacket flew onto the track and became wedged under the train.
Cyrus McGoldrick, civil rights manager at the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said Wednesday that the authorities had overreacted. He said 60 patrol cars and 100 police officers from nine departments had responded to the disturbance, which he said had involved 40 people at most. He said video taken during the episode showed the police pushing at least one Muslim woman to the ground.
“There seems to have been a disproportionate response in which police used excessive strength and force to subdue female protesters,” Mr. McGoldrick said. “That had a snowball effect on the antagonism and aggression that ensued.”
Sharif Aly, vice president of the Muslim American Society of New York, said it was investigating the episode to determine whether the group had been singled out for being Muslim.
Mr. Tartaglia said that nearly 6,000 people were at the amusement park at the time, and that police intervention had been necessary to ensure public safety. “The incident was very quickly escalating,” he said, “and the police had no choice to interfere, or it could have turned into a riot.”
David Mandt, spokesman for the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions, whose members include Disney World and the company that operates the attractions at Coney Island, said it was not unusual for amusement parks to require guests to remove or secure loose articles, including head scarves or hats of any kind.
Kristin Siebeneicher, a spokeswoman for Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, N.J., said that for safety reasons, no loose articles were allowed on rides. But hijabs, which are typically securely wrapped around the head, are allowed, she said.
Ms. Siebeneicher said that those wearing the hijab were advised to exercise caution on Six Flags’ most “extreme” ride, the Kingda Ka, a 45-story roller coaster that she said was the tallest in the world and the fastest in North America, going from zero to 128 miles per hour in 3.5 seconds.
“Because that roller coaster is so extreme, we require that head scarves are tightly fastened,” she said. “But we are more than happy to have them along on the ride.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/01/ny...ut-hajibs.html

**Levanaye Zalmaye** · 09-02-2011, 08:29 PM

From what I can tell, all headgear is disallowed on that particular ride. And that includes hijabs, too. The reasons are pretty simple:

Mr. Tartaglia recalled an April 2010 episode in Sydney, Australia, in which a 26-year-old mother wearing a hijab was strangled after her head scarf became tangled in the wheel axle of a go-kart. In another incident, in Buena Park, Calif., in 2000, two dozen people were stranded on a roller coaster for about three hours after a rider’s jacket flew onto the track and became wedged under the train.

By the way, girls who wear hijabs here aren't as fundamentalist and extremist as their expat counterparts in the West. It's a bloody ride, you can take it off for a minute. If you don't wanna take it off cuz you fear the fires of hell and you don't want a genie and a black man to fall in love with you because of your extremely seductive hair, get on some other ride. Or stay back home and clean the house.

These people were offered refunds but they insisted on putting up a fight.

AshrafGhaljay, I will be the first one to point out that quite a few Americans have a very bigoted worldview but you also have to accept that this is the country that has given refuge to millions of Muslims from all over the world, who have a better standard of living there than they could ever dream of having in their native countries. So the video response of one redneck doesn't tell the whole story.

In Pakistan, when a Christian man speaks out against a law that is used specifically against Christians in personal feuds, he is killed on the streets and no one wants to pursue his case. The rights that you expat Muslims enjoy in the infidel West are heaven compared to what non-Muslims minorities live through over here.

Edit: The title of this thread is both misleading and factually incorrect. It's aimed at instigating the average user. It's like what a bunch of Arabs did with the Danish cartoon thing but that's another story.

**afghan** · 09-02-2011, 11:43 PM

when it happens in the west, everything turned into discrimination and racism. if a muslim country would do such a thing then its a law.

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muslim lady beaten and arrested by cops on eid day at Rye Playland new york.

muslim lady beaten and arrested by cops on eid day at Rye Playland new york.

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