Sikh-Canadian comedian Jasmeet Singh, known to his hundreds of thousands of YouTube followers for his parodies and vlogs, did not feel a wee bit humorous when security officials at San Francisco airport made him take off his turban before boarding a flight to his home in Toronto last week.
Singh, popularly known as Jus Reign to his fans, was forced to remove his turban at San Francisco International airport by Transportation Security Administration Feb. 22 before he was allowed to fly, according to an NBC News report.
After a series of security checks, he was forced to remove his turban although he had already passed through the body-scan machine and had been patted down, head to toe, with the metal detector.
The incident comes barely a few weeks after Waris Ahluwalia, a Sikh-American actor who has lived in New York since he was five, was disallowed to board a plane home from Mexico to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York Feb. 8, allegedly because of his turban.
In the latest incident involving Jasmeet Singh, although airline officials reportedly provided a private room for him to remove his turban so that it could be X-rayed, Singh said they would not provide a mirror for him to retie his turban, and suggested that Singh walk through the airport terminal bareheaded to find a public restroom in which to retie his turban.
“Pretty much the vibe that I was getting was that we’ve done our business, we’ve taken care of our security measures and you’re not our problem anymore. We’re not going to accommodate you now that we’ve done what we need to do,” Singh told the NBC News.
In an interview with CBC Radio, Canada’s National Public Radio, Singh said that it was an embarrassing ordeal. “It’s very demeaning and very demoralizing”, he was quoted by the radio as saying.
Singh said that his main concern is the lack of education and cultural training for American security agents.
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