The border mentality

[kliljedahl]

The border mentality
By James Carroll | July 19, 2005

ONE TIME, a US Customs official sent a chill through me, and I feel it still. We were returning from a ski trip to Canada. At the border, the official was brusque as he interrogated me. To my horror, I realized that I had neglected to declare a purchase made at the ski resort, and he seemed to sense it. He began a rough search of our car. His rudeness prompted me to say at one point: ''You can't treat me like this. I have rights. I am an American."

He looked at me coldly. ''You're not in America yet, Bub. You don't have rights until I say you do." I felt humiliated, but instructed. A border by definition is the territory of absolute power, and such power by definition demeans.

I thought of that encounter last Thursday when I learned that a distinguished leader of the Islamic community in London was refused admittance into the United States at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. Zaki Badawi is an Egyptian-born scholar, the principal of the Muslim College in London, which trains imams and Islamic leaders, emphatically preparing them to build bridges with British culture. Holding a doctorate from the University of London, Badawi has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth, has served as an adviser to Tony Blair, and is co-editor of an interfaith magazine with an archbishop and a chief rabbi. He is in his 80s.

Badawi was en route to the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, where he was to give a major address on the compatibility of Islam and Western culture. But on Wednesday evening, US border officials at JFK detained the elderly scholar for six hours, then put him on a plane back to England. Rejected.

Link: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/07/19/the_border_mentality/


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