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News > World

Doing Math on a Flight Can Now Get You Accused of Terrorism

  • Guido Menzio serves as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s economics faculty and has worked at Princeton and Stanford.

    Guido Menzio serves as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s economics faculty and has worked at Princeton and Stanford. | Photo: Wikimedia Commons-Facebook

Published 7 May 2016
Opinion

An American Airline passenger seated next to the Ivy League professor suspected the unfamiliar writings were a code for a bomb, or Arabic letters.

A leading Ivy League economist from the United States was escorted off a plane after a woman suspected he was a terrorist after seeing him doing math equations in his notebook that she thought were unfamiliar markings similar to Arabic, The Washington Post reported Saturday.

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Guido Menzio is currently an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Economics and has also worked at Princeton and Stanford. Last year, he won the 2015 Carlo Alberto Medal for Best Italian Economist Under 40.

However, Menzio is also non-white, has curly hair and speaks with a foreign accent, which seems to be the only thing needed for some to suspect one is affiliated with terror.

After leaving the gate, an unnamed blonde woman seated next to Menzio went up to the flight attendants to express her concern over his unfamiliar markings in his notebook.

After a long wait, the plane headed back to the gate and the pilot came over to Menzio’s seat and informed him that he will be escorted off the plane and taken to meet an agent.

The Washington Post reports that he was “taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation.”

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The agent informed Menzio that he was suspected of terrorism, and began to look at his notebook. But he learned the unfamiliar markings “weren’t Arabic, or some other terrorist code. They were math.”

Two hours later after being suspected of terrorism, the renowned academic was taken back to his seat and the plane took off. Menzio told The Washington Post that he was treated respectfully throughout the whole incident.

He added that he was troubled by the ignorance of his fellow passenger, as well as a "security protocol that is too rigid—in the sense that once the whistle is blown everything stops without checks—and relies on the input of people who may be completely clueless.”

He attributed the increased paranoia by people such as the passenger to the current political rhetoric being thrown around during the presidential election season.

“It is hard not to recognize in this incident, the ethos of (Donald) Trump’s voting base,” Menzio added.

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