Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has been accused of “encouraging racism” after he said Muslim men should be subjected to profiling in airports because they were a “threat”.
Mr O’Leary said terrorists ‘will generally be males of a Muslim persuasion’ – and that families with young children should be let through security as they are less likely to ‘blow’ people up.
The 58-year-old added that the only way to ‘deal with the threat’ was to vet ‘single male’ Muslims traveling on their own.
The Muslim Council of Britain said the comments amounted to discrimination against Muslim passengers as they branded the comments ‘racist’.
And hate-crime monitoring group Tell Mama suggested his ‘flippant’ words could end up having serious consequences for the budget airline.
Mr. O’Leary had told The Times: ‘Who are the bombers? They are going to be single males traveling on their own.
‘If you are traveling with a family of kids, on you go; the chances you are going to blow them all up is zero.’
He added: ‘You can’t say stuff, because it’s racism, but it will generally be males of Muslim persuasion. Thirty years ago it was the Irish.
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A spokeswoman for the Muslim Council of Britain said: ‘Michael O’Leary should be under no illusion: his comments are racist and discriminatory.
‘He openly advocates discrimination against “males of a Muslim persuasion”, which presumably is not based on specific intelligence but solely whether someone ‘looks or acts like a Muslim’.
‘This is the very definition of Islamophobia.’
The spokeswoman said Muslims already face challenges in airline travel and added: ‘It is a shame that such racism is being expressed so openly and that the CEO of a large airline would so want to discriminate against his customers so brazenly.’
Mr. O’Leary is no stranger to controversy, having previously said “shoot them” in reference to environmentalists and travel agents, and called obese people “monsters”.
He also stirred anger nationwide after suggesting passengers should pay to use toilets on flights and even pushed proposals to remove two of the three lavatories on each plane so they could be replaced with seats.
