finally a little common sense
as the writer correctly perceives
the media have been busily trying to dig up cross border horror
stories
that has really been the only story here
& it is understandable that the writer would make jalbert into the
single exception that was necessary to make her point so well
but she too overlooks the fact that armed felons guilty of breaking
& entering & burglary & possession etc are supposed to get
caught in the immigration vacuum cleaner
which has been eliminating & discouraging undesirables like
this for decades
but is just sucking a little harder lately
naturally
good story tho
with that exception
--- In BoundaryPoint@y..., "Doug Murray Productions"
<doug@d...> wrote:
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-
> 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.
> mwente@g...
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------=
-------
>
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>
>
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