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Wed/Thurs -

UP, UP AND AWAY... As'ad's Travel Rant...

[Ah, those friendly skies... Good thing nobody's sneakers exploded... Friendly skies, stay friendly on me. Cha-cha-chah... Oh, and: funny but you don't look Phoenician!]


>> Today I was met by this person at the entrance to the gate who, upon looking at my US passport, greeted me with Two Arabic Words. When I asked him if he knew Arabic, he said no, that he only knew a few words. But it was obvious that he was trained in recognizing Arabic names.

I was then escorted to a new [segregated] section, where you stand like an idiot surrounded by tape... And in these situations, I tend to get very snippy and snappy, which often makes matters worse.

(Once, in New York, I was snippy with an officer, and he said: I will make things worse for you; I bet you are one of those radical professors that I read about. I lied to him. I said: No, I own a falafil stand in Washington, DC.)

They stamped an SSSS sign (and circled it) on my boarding pass, which only meant a repeat of the special treatment before boarding the plane.

The Syrian woman who just "happened to" sit next to me on the plane (was it random that they placed her next to another Arab?) also had an SSSS stamp on her boarding pass, and she also told me about the special treatment to which she was subjected.

We asked the white guy sitting next to us for his boarding pass, and it did not have that SSSS stamp. It almost had a "Have a Nice Day, Dude!" sign instead.

I asked the officers today: On what basis am I being selected? Is it my hair? My Arabic-sounding name? My place of birth? My ethnicity? or what? One of them said: It is all by computer.

I said: but the computer is NOT a human being, although some computers are known to enjoy a beverage of lemonade once in a while. What do you program your computers to look for... <<


:: BRANDED WITH SSSS ::
-- Entry of Sunday, June 6th, 4:34am --


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