Brawl in New York

Who is telling the truth?  This summer, we had to remove baseball caps on rides at an amusement park.   No brawl broke out. 


Ramadan head-scarf brawl erupts at Rye Playland


By JOSH SAUL


A group of Muslims furious over a head-scarf ban at Rye Playland got into a brawl with security yesterday that resulted in 15 arrests, authorities said.

Westchester officials who run the amusement park blamed the Queens tour operator who organized the outing celebrating the end of Ramadan, saying he failed to tell the 3,000 members of the Muslim American Society of New York who made the trip that, out of safety concerns, scarves are not permitted on some of the site's most popular rides.

As irked families started lining up for refunds at the gate at around 2:30 p.m. after being informed of the policy, they started fighting among themselves, said county parks Deputy Commissioner Peter Tartaglia.

That prompted parks guards to intervene, and things got only wilder as cops arrived, witnesses said.

"[The guards] were beating down the girls, then they started beating down the guys" as they came to their aid," Lola Ali, 16, of Queens, told the Journal News.

Note that when an activity is reported to have started, but not completed as indication of missing information.

Sharif Aly, the lawyer for the Muslim American Society, which is based in Brooklyn, said, "There is a lot of misinformation out there.
"It was meant to be a day of celebration and community."
Tartaglia said most of the people in the group were from Brooklyn.
He defended the park's headgear ban, saying, "Our . . . policy is designed to protect the safety of patrons . . . Depending on the ride, it can become a projectile that hurts someone else, or it could strangle you if it got caught on something.
"We don't discriminate," he insisted. "A baseball cap is headgear. This policy was repeatedly articulated to the tour operator, but, unfortunately, the message did not reach some of the members of his group."


The melee resulted in two guards being injured, and closed down the park to new visitors for two hours