Always_Ask_Questions,
“I am not “against the Jews”, I am simply trying to extract a lesson for us from this to grow”
And I am simply trying to extract a lesson about dan l’kaf zechus and regarding your fellow Jews with basic respect. How can you declaim any of the lessons you think the Jewish people need to learn from you when you can’t even get the facts of the case straight?
“rather than getting warm satisfaction from how good we all are against a hostile world”
I haven’t written or read anything self-congratulatory in this thread. The discussion is what constitutes a kiddush Hashem, specifically whether the simple public performance of a mitzvah is a kiddush Hashem even if bystanders are bothered by it. Some posters are insistent on finding faults surrounding the mitzvah observance to show it is really a chillul Hashem and the basic question went unanswered, so I tried to clarify the question by presenting a case where those faults were absent. Like an undergrad physics student working Newton’s Laws on a uniform frictionless plane. This seemingly blew such a fuse in your mind that it took several posts to get you to stop inserting imaginary faults onto the Jew in the example, and even then you couldn’t accept the example as stated and give a straight answer to the question I asked. Well, I guess you begrudgingly did in the end after declaring that the flight attendant must be evil or deranged and that the example was not plausible anyway.
“And again, taking your description at face value, I am not even sure why he is being arrested – he is not doing anything, he is simply not replying. I don’t think this is illegal.”
Fine, say rather he was removed from the flight, questioned, and then released without charges. That better matches the real-world case I based my example on.
“As to people reacting to tefilin, whenever I had to daven shaharis before an early flight, I either did it in the car at the airport or spent several minutes looking for an empty corner, so never encountered strong reaction.”
And if someone saw you “acting suspiciously” in the parking garage or a quiet corner of the terminal, reported it, and a security brouhaha ensued, would you declare that being secretive about praying was an aveira and you should’ve done it more publicly so as to not look suspicious?