To begin with I still disagree that the possibility that the stewardess was simply stupid/paranoid is significantly less likely than the racial angle. I maintain my disagreement that if we should discard those possibilities because one would quickly meet a ‘trifecta’ situation where a bearded man didn’t want his luggage touched and was reading a book having some to do with airplanes, that we could also expect a dark-skinned man to be reading a book having something to do with airplanes who didn’t want his luggage touched.
I maintain that some people have decided that this is a racist event, and are arguing backwards from that point in an attempt to justify their conclusions.
That being said, I think that your claim that an alternate gloss is even less likely now if we assume that the airline has some sort of policy in place about receiving reports of terrorism is an instance of that backwards-driven rationalization designed to support a pre-chosen conclusion. For liability purposes alone, I’d find it truly shocking if airlines did not have a policy in place that they have to investigate all allegations of terrorists on their planes. Can you imagine the legal fallout if a plane was blown out of the sky and on the black box the victims families found a recording of a stewardess reporting someone she thought was a terrorist and the pilot going “Naw, let’s just get into the air. What’s the worst that could happen?”