The
Age Of Paranoia: Banning The Burkha, A Terrorist Living In
Neighbourhood...
30 January 2010By Mustaqim S Bleher
Be afraid, be very afraid! There may be a terrorist
living in your neighbourhood. Don't take any chances.
If you know of Muslim student looking up information
on the location of airports around the world, don't
hesitate to report him, so he can be duly arrested for
possessing material likely to be of use to potential
terrorists. If a non-Muslim student posing as pacifist
protests by holding up a placard outside an army
training base, don't leave things to chance, get
police dogs and helicopter back-up. We can't have army
cadets put in harms way before they even go to
Afghanistan. If you're an airline pilot and one of
your passengers is an orthodox Jew wanting to say his
morning prayers, you better head for the nearest
airport. If your passenger is a Muslim about to pray,
you should try an immediate crash landing, maybe the
Hudson River. We need better security. Ban the Burkha.
Don't let those Muslim women get away with hiding
their faces. God only knows what else they may be
hiding. We live in very dangerous times.
Troubles is, where do you start and where do you stop.
Why should there be naked body scanners only at
airports? Did not the 7/7 terrorists try and blow up
trains and buses? So did the Madrid train bombers. Why
are we not strip-searched when entering a train
station. Why can I board a coach or bus with as many
bottles of water (or peroxide) as I like? Those
terrorists sure are clever people. They've understood
that it is getting harder to board a plane with
explosives. Knowing that you can cause just as much
carnage outside of airports, they're sure to
diversify, so where are the risk assessments for
public spaces unrelated to aviation? In Iraq scores of
people get killed daily in bomb attacks since that
glorious "liberation", and none of them at an airport.
Whenever a past attempted terrorist attack gets widely
reported, the US government raises the security threat
level from elevated to high or from yellow to orange,
and the UK government follows suit by raising its
threat level from substantial to severe. But if it's
severe in the USA, then it's critical in the UK. So
much for cooperation in fighting terror - they can't
even agree on the terminology. What's severe on the
European side of the Atlantic, isn't quite severe yet
on American soil. But leaving this aside, why does the
threat level never go up before an attack? Don't we
all spend enough money on so-called intelligence? What
is the basis of those classifications? Since they are
for our own protection, shouldn't we be getting some
transparency at least?
Unfortunately, there's nothing intelligent at all
about the whole hocuspocus. In fact, whenever the
threat level indicates that an attack is highly
likely, we usually get a period of calm, whereas the
attacks that lead to the subsequent raising of the
threat level usually take place after the threat level
has been indicating a lower risk. Of course, it is not
for us lesser mortals to probe into the wisdom of such
things. This is the job of security experts who sadly
would be out of a job if things made sense or added
up.
If an alien came to earth and read the papers or
listened to the radio or watched television, he would
immediately be on guard against those nasty
terrorists. He'd be watching his back. He'd stop
drinking water in case it exploded inside him. He'd
wonder why people are allowed to wear clothes at all
since they could be hiding explosives. He wouldn't
ever risk using public transport. Chances are, he'd
die in a car accident.
About 115 people die daily in car accidents across the
United States. In the UK, a much smaller place, it is
8 people a day. Three times as many die in other
accidents, for example at work or at home. In fact,
people's homes are the most dangerous places of all.
And as far as violent killings go, most people are
murdered by somebody who knew them. Thus whilst going
out is dangerous, staying home might not be an option
either to prevent harm. Besides, your own children
might have been radicalised by terrorist recruiters
and start experimenting with explosives in the
bathroom. Did I mention swine flu?
Anxiety disorder, characterised by irrational fear,
used to be a psychiatric condition. Now it's become
the social norm. If our governments really want to
protect us and have our best interest at heart, they
should invest in something rather cheap: a sense of
proportion.
There, I said it. Now I'm waiting for that knock on
the door.
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