Get Ready for a New Round of Grievance Theater: Muslim Family Removed From AirTran Flight

While this appears on first glance as a misunderstanding, expect the unindicted terror co-conspirators from CAIR to crank out the press releases and hold press conferences decrying "Islamophobia" along with lawsuits to be filed.

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark.

Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI.

Kashif Irfan, one of the removed passengers, said the incident began about 1 p.m. after his brother, Atif, and his brother's wife wondered aloud about the safest place to sit on an airplane.

"My brother and his wife were discussing some aspect of airport security," Irfan said. "The only thing my brother said was, 'Wow, the jets are right next to my window.' I think they were remarking about safety."

Irfan said he and the others think they were profiled because of their appearance. He said five of the six adults in the party are of South Asian descent, and all six are traditionally Muslim in appearance, with the men wearing beards and the women in headscarves. Irfan, 34, is an anesthesiologist. His brother, 29, is a lawyer. Both live in Alexandria with their families, and both were born in Detroit. They were traveling with their wives, Kashif Irfan's sister-in-law, a friend and Kashif Irfan's three sons, ages 7, 4 and 2.

AirTran spokesman Tad Hutcheson agreed that the incident amounted to a misunderstanding. But he defended AirTran's handling of the incident, which he said strictly followed federal rules. And he denied any wrongdoing on the airline's part.

"At the end of the day, people got on and made comments they shouldn't have made on the airplane, and other people heard them," Hutcheson said. "Other people heard them, misconstrued them. It just so happened these people were of Muslim faith and appearance. It escalated, it got out of hand and everyone took precautions."

Don't expect this to go away any time soon.

"It was an ordeal," said Abdur Razack Aziz, the family friend who was also detained. "Nothing came out of it. It was paranoid people. It was very sad."

Well, any time you have Muslims in traditional garb uttering the word bomb, they should expect a certain reaction. Oh, and here's a stunner: CAIR already already sprung into action.

A source told FOX 5 the Irfans were not allowed on another Airtran plane because while at the gate trying to re-book their flight, someone in the family mentioned Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and said the word 'bomb'.

The airline says the 95 other passengers on the original flight and all of their luggage had to be taken off the plane and re-screened. The Irfan family was eventually booked on a U.S. Airways flight on New Year's night, and off to a spiritual retreat in Central Florida.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) reports that nine American Muslims were removed from an AirTran Airways flight this afternoon at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and refused re-booking by the airline, despite being cleared by Federal authorities.

That didn't take long. CAIR was already reacting before they got on another flight. The family must have them on speed-dial.

See update to this story here.