I swear by the Blood of Allah, I'm no terrorist

When I was preparing to travel around South East Asia a couple of years back, my family was a bit worried about me. My grandmother didn’t really know where South East Asia was, thinking it might have been somewhere near Peru, where a friend of hers was working. Then my brother told her that I was going to Vietnam, expecting her to have some frame of reference with regard to that country. When she looked blankly back at him, and he mentioned the “W” word, which left her freaking out for the whole 6 months I was away.

Then there was my mother. She told me if I didn’t cut my hair people would think I was in Al-Queda. I told her that I’d ignored similar warnings from her before and never had cause to regret it, but that was before 9/11, she told me.

September 11 might have been the day that everything changed, but only in broad geopolitical terms; and my mother’s advice was just as insane as it had ever been. There was no point in trying to tell her that fundamentalist Muslims wore their hair short with a beard, or that the westerners that have given South-East Asians the most trouble are ones with short backs and sides.

A Republic of Ireland passport is like a magical skeleton key that lets you get into anywhere, as Ireland is EU but non-NATO.

In my travels I never had any problems crossing borders. I spent about ten minutes in the airport in Bangkok, I’ve often spent more time queuing in the supermarket. The people in every embassy were as friendly as can be, except when I tried to get into the Iraqi embassy in Hanoi, which was a block away from Cambodia’s. In fact, the only time I was ever delayed at customs was back in advanced, sophisticated Europe.

Once, coming across the Austrian-German border by coach pre-Schengen, the bus was stopped for two hours because there was allegedly an irregularity with someone’s UK passport. Actually there was nothing wrong with it, he was just basically a dark-skinned person. The irony was that there were quite a few Slovakian gypsies on the bus whose papers might have at least warranted some close examination, but they were just waved through. Presumably the German border guards have a sort of colour scheme like one of those things who get from Furniture stores when looking for paint.

Then there’s the UK. O, Boy, have I had hassle there. One time boarding the ferry at Fishguard at around 3 in the morning, I was asked where I’d come from and was unwise enough to tell them I’d been to Prague.

“What’s your connection there?” they snapped back, as snappily as it’s possible for someone with a Welsh accent to snap.

I was totally mystified when they took my passport and ran it through their computer but it later turned out that they were mounting a nationwide clampdown against the IRA and were hassling Irish people on the vaguest pretext.

People become customs officials because of the enormous power it gives them. They get some sort of malign kick of delaying people’s journeys or stopping them coming into their countries altogether. It’s a job for people who either too smart or not burly enough to become Nightclub bouncers, though if you get kicked out of a nightclub you can always try and get in somewhere else whereas this isn’t always the case with nation-states.

So I’m a bit distressed to hear that police and customs officials are going to get a whole new raft of powers, though in theory at least, these will be applied mainly to Muslims. I don’t know how they are supposed to distinguish between Muslims and people of other religion or secularists or agnostics. Twenty or thirty years ago you could have detained people overnight without food and then offered them some pork scratchings, but today a lot of people are genuine vegetarians so this might not work anymore. Of course if you detain them for 24 hours they might forget where they are and then start praying towards Mecca, though this might be a bit of a giveaway.

My fear is that, in spite of Charles Clarke’s promise that very few people will be affected by this bill, it’s my fear that while most terrorists are cunning and know how to avoid being caught, a lot of people will get hassled and they won’t all be genuine Muslims, but people who are victims of whatever prejudices afflict the authority figure they’re being victimised by.

While I’m not ignoring the possibility of a terrorist attack in the UK, I’m certain that more people will be persecuted by the “justice” system than will ever be the victims of terror.

When Rudolf Heydrich, the man who organised the holocaust, was shot by two Czech freedom fighters in 1942, the Nazis responded by razing an entire Czech village of 172 people to the ground. That might seem barbaric to us but it seems like at the moment the British and Americans are trying to emalate that feat by killing that many Arabs for everyone who died on September 11. By some estimates they're a third of the way there, before you even consider the half a million that died in Iraq as a result of sanctions.

If you still think that Fundamentalist Muslims present more of a threat to the British State than vice-versa, consider the following.

Number of people killed in Britain by Muslim terrorists, ever: 0
Number of Muslims detained in Britain since September 11 (2001) 700

Naomi Klein has an excellent piece about how the American media reports deaths: one American equals two west Europeans eqauls four Eastern Europeans... you see where this is going.

The particularly sinister thing about this new legislation is that they can imprison people without charge for a fortnight, not only for crimes they have commited, but for crimes they may be about to commit. Why stop there guys? Why not arrest people not only for what they have done but what they have failed to do? Haven't we all sinned in our thoughts as well as our words?

Haven't they learned the lessons of internment from their experience in Northern Ireland, which is that if you want people to stop bombing you, the last thing you do is persecute as many of their race as you possibly can? The tragic flaw from the point of view of the British is that many people who weren't terrorists before they were detained for 14 days probably will be after they leave. I guess Tony Blair was busy with his rock'n'roll band at the time, but surely he saw In the Name of the Father?

The worrying thing from my point of view is that it's more than probable that many of the people who're victimised won't be either muslims or terrorists, but ordinary Irish guys like myself, who've been the main victims of the terror laws already in existence, particulary when the so-called peace process is going through a less-than-peaceful stage.

Once in Victoria Station I was pulled up and strip-searched by a plain-clothes detective, allegedly because "someone matching my description" was seen smoking dope on cctv. Why did he do this? Because he could. The more power you give to minor authority figures, the more they abuse it. We employ morally and intellectually uncomplicated people to be police as thier job should only be to apprehend alleged criminals, whereas they are tried by people with a more complex view of things. By giving police the power to arrest and detain people on the mere suspicion that they might be up to something, the pyramid of justice that's worked reasonably well for 800 years or so is turned on his head.

I'm scared shitless to travel through England at the moment, not that I want to visit their shitty little country anyway, but I do want to go to Greece and the cheapest way is through Gatwick.

I don't want to end up like Joy Gardner, a West Indian woman who horribly died in the custody of British immigration police.

And that was before they got the new powers that the Commons has passed and will probably go through the house of Lords as well.

Be Afraid. Be very Afraid.