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Bound for border glory  By MARGARET WENTE Saturday, November 16, 2002 Print Edition, Page A21 The other day, a woman I know told me that her daughter gets stopped and searched almost every time she flies across the border. Her daughter is an ordinary college kid who has become increasingly distressed by this. So the last time she was searched, she asked why. What was it about her that made the authorities so suspicious? "You look kind," the security guard blurted out. "You look like you won't yell at us." Evidently, there are many reasons for stopping people at the border. It's not nice to be pulled aside for special treatment. But maybe some people are being a little oversensitive about it. The Canadian Islamic Congress, a group you can always count on to denounce mistreatment both real and imaginary, has issued an urgent warning to Muslims to avoid travel to the U.S. It has also offered up its latest example of unfair targeting. The victim, a Canadian-born computer student at the University of Waterloo, said he had been randomly searched the last four times he's boarded a plane to cross the border. "While others whizzed by the ticket booth and onto the plane, I had to stand back as agents sifted through every detail of my luggage and dirty underwear -- in full view of everyone else on my flight," he related. "At one point, they asked me to remove my hat and belt, lift up my shirt and hands, and open the top button of my pants. Then they told me to 'stay silent as we pat you down.' " The student, Ali Asaria, said these incidents had humiliated him. A CIC official said she was not surprised. "Once again, we Muslims are being targeted because of our religion, and humiliated through biased racial profiling." I would have been sympathetic, except for the fact that exactly the same humiliations were inflicted on a clean-cut, Anglo-Saxon, Canadian-born friend of mine the last four times he flew. Another middle-aged man told me that, each time he crosses the border with his 14-year-old son, they're split up and grilled separately for evidence of abduction or pedophilia. The media have been busily trying to dig up cross-border horror stories. One newspaper found an outraged Muslim cleric who had been detained at the border and cross-examined for seven hours. Considering that he's also a recent immigrant from Pakistan and the head of a religious school, and that some religious schools have ties to people suspected of being extremists, you might ask him what, exactly, did he expect? The paper also found a pair of Iranian-born Canadians who had been delayed at Niagara Falls for an entire hour.They're so incensed, they're boycotting the U.S. So far, the only clear-cut victim of tighter border regulations is a poor schmo named Michel Jalbert, who was thrown in jail for buying gas. Mr. Jalbert, who lives in the obscure border town of Pohénégamook, Que., drove a few metres across the line to fill up, just as he'd been doing for the past 15 years, and got nailed by the U.S. border police. He had his shotgun in his truck, so he got nailed for a weapons offence as well. He sat in jail for nearly a month, the victim of some small-town bureaucrats run amok, until Colin Powell set him free. Mr. Jalbert is not an immigrant from a suspicious country. He's a unilingual Québécois. His only real offence was being a member of the lumpenproletariat. Him, I can feel sorry for. People sometimes speak of the airport security guards who rummage through their luggage as if they had been recruited by Nazi storm troopers. In reality, they're low-paid labour who aren't hip enough to be baristas at Starbucks. They're usually minorities themselves. Some of them are smart, some nice, some rude, some dumb. They have mysterious rules they must obey, and nearly all the people they stop have better jobs and prospects than they do. So I guess I find it hard to shed a tear for Rohinton Mistry, an author I adore, who was so upset about his treatment at U.S. airports that he cancelled his book tour. His publisher said his humiliation had become "unbearable." "They pull you aside and, while your fellow passengers come onto the plane, they look at you, wondering if you've been a naughty boy because someone is taking your luggage apart and taking your shoes off and examining them very closely," he told the Toronto Star. "I began having visions of Guantanamo." Well, taking off your shoes in public does infantilize you. But Guantanamo? Yesterday, I placed a random call to an Iraqi man I know, Ahmed al-Hayderi. As it happened, he was getting off a plane from the U.S. "How's it going?" I asked. "You must be getting a hard time these days." "Not really," he told me on his cellphone. "Last week, I got a few questions. But this week was a breeze." Mr. Hayderi, a Canadian citizen, works in the high-tech industry and flies across the border every three weeks or so. He seemed sorry to disappoint me. "I have to confess it hasn't been a problem." As for Mr. Mistry, I'm truly sorry he's had such a hard time. But I
wondered that a famous, prize-winning, brilliant, rich and much-loved
author was not made of slightly sterner stuff. With all due respect, if he
really wants to know how it feels to be a target, maybe he should ask
Salman Rushdie. |
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"A movie was being shot and they detained me for continuity."