Dr. Mohammad T. Al-Rasheed

Arab News

In the age of terror, security is a necessity and not a luxury. The checkpoints that have sprung up on every major street of our cities are a sign of the times and should be accepted as such. Yet the question raised (among many) is how effective are they in proportion to the disruption they cause to everyday life?

Those who plan murderous acts in secret until they execute them will know how to avoid such checkpoints. Surely, they are not that stupid.

The men operating those checkpoints leave much to be desired. Apart from the bizarre habit of cracking sunflower seeds while handling one’s papers, they seem intent on insulting ordinary citizens by treating them as if already guilty.

It is obvious that they need training in communication skills. Two of them, manning an entrance to a compound atop an armored vehicle with a massive machine gun, left it and sauntered across the street to buy cigarettes. Their act could be seen from the offices they were supposed to protect. What if someone jumped on that vehicle and wreaked havoc?

Another side effect these new measures have exposed is a rather irksome sense of duplicity. When the United States imposed stiff security measures after Sept. 11, people around here were writing and complaining about how thoroughly their luggage was searched at JFK Airport. We have yet to hear from those injured sensibilities about being stopped every two miles. It is not honorable to be intellectually duplicitous; if you accept an idea or a notion, it should universally apply. The Americans have as much right to try to protect themselves as we do here. I would like those pundits and professors to come out and explain the sudden silence.

I wrote against the American policy of fingerprinting a certain section of the population because it smacks of profiling. But had they insisted that all visitors to the US be fingerprinted, I would have no problem with it.

Actually, it will speed up entry procedures. In Dubai, people are doing it voluntarily to be issued a card that opens a gate at immigration through which they glide effortlessly.

At the risk of sounding daft, one should not act and react to events based on who initiated them. The act itself should be the only corpse on the dissecting table.

To most eyes watching a river flow by, it would seem possible to dip once, twice, or indeed ad infinitum in this same river. But it takes a Heraclitus to point out that “one cannot step twice in the same river, for fresh waters are forever flowing in upon you.” I only wish the professors who complained before and the officers who are checking the river of cars streaming by on city streets took that into consideration.