Public stripping: price of security apartheid

John Cornelius, president of the local Association of Flight Attendants, says the male passenger's "ultimate gesture of futility" should qualify him as a candidate for "2002 Person of the Year." 

In a country long used to a free life style, the new security measures, including the profiling of passengers at airports, security check points near bridges and tunnels, and midnight raids by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), are perceived as more reminisicent of politically repressive Third World governments than a Western democracy.

But the United States is fighting a war against terrorism — and it is determined to win this battle even if civil liberties and human rights are violated in the process.

Last week, in an irony of ironies, a US Congressman who was a member of the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee, underwent a form of harassment that only most Middle Easterners and Muslims are subject to on a regular basis these days.

Representative John Dingell, a 75-year-old Democrat from the State of Michigan, was forced to walk back and forth through the metal detector because he was wearing surgically implanted pins in his ankles and had a steel hip joint.

When the Congressman, who didn't reveal his identity, refused to cooperate by sending his wallet through the X-ray machine, he was taken to a backroom, told to take his trousers off, and was stripped down to his socks.

The third degree treatment on a Congressman, most of whom wield immense political clout, evoked a strong apology from the Transportation Secretary, a ranking cabinet member in the Bush administration.

But the incident at the airport also proved that a US Congressman is no different from an average American — particularly with his pants down.

The following day a teenage Muslim girl, born and bred in the US, was forced — under protest — to remove her head scarf at an airport in Washington DC.

Interviewed on TV networks the next day, she said she was singled out by airport security officials and asked to remove the scarf in full view of all other passengers even though she pleaded it was part of her religious obligation to cover her head.

But the interviewer insisted that she, like all other Americans, had to comply with the new security measures in force — whether she likes it or not.

The girl, however, shut him up when she said that minutes before she passed through the metal detector, a Catholic nun in a habit and a headgear was not subjected to the same search. Isn't this racial profiling? she asked.

Last month a Sri Lankan Muslim doctor, a senior physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, one of the most prestigious hospitals in New York, was pulled up on the highway by a cop in the neighbouring State of New Jersey.

The cop got out of his patrol car and walked up to the bearded doctor (an obvious signal to most Americans that he was a Muslim) in a random check of his credentials.

But the cop, who looked at the ID displayed on his jacket, asked him: "So you work at Mount Sinai, ?". When he said, he did, the cop replied: "So, you are a good Muslim?".

And now it takes a New Jersey cop to make the distinction between a "good Muslim and a bad Muslim." 

Traditionally, it is the black Americans, who have been racially profiled and discriminated against in this country for more than a century.

When the Pilgrim Fathers, the first permanent English settlers, arrived in this country in 1620 they landed on the Plymouth Rock on the shores of Massachussetts Bay.

But the late Malcom X, one of the most charismatic African-American leaders, said rather aptly of his people: "We didn't land on the Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth Rock landed on us."

At a media seminar last month, Shashi Thahoor of India, the interim head of the UN's Department of Public Information, said that many of his black American friends now felt that in the current climate in the US they were no longer discriminated against — for a change. 

"They look with sympathy," he said,"towards all those who are brown-skinned."