This is what happens when you try to visit the United States.

By Niels Gerson Lohman 

 

Why I Will Never, Ever, Go Back to the United States

 

I was going to take the train from Montreal to New Orleans. The travels I had been undertaking earlier this year had brought me to places that were meant to form the background of my second novel.

This trip, however, was for my dad. He, a trumpet player, loved New Orleans and had died a year ago. It felt like the first sensible trip I undertook this year. I had been searching for ways to forget about the last hours at his deathbed. He had been ill for 15 years and his body just would not give up. It was a violent sight. I had decided the trip to New Orleans would put an end to those memories.
Usually, I barely plan my trips in advance. But this time I had booked everything: my train tickets, hotels and my flight back to Montreal, from which I would depart back to Amsterdam. In total the trip was supposed to take three weeks. The confirmations and tickets I had printed and tucked away in a brown envelope I had bought especially for the trip. I like things to be neatly arranged. At home, in Amsterdam, my house enjoys a slight version of OCD.
The first part of the trip, from Montreal to New York, is known to be one of the world's prettiest train routes. When we had just passed the sign 'Welcome to the State of New York,' the train pulled over for a border check. I put the brown envelope on my lap. On top of the envelope I filled in my migration form with utmost dedication. I love border crossings. Forms don't lie.
The customs officer walked by and asked everybody on the train a few questions. Where they were from, where they were heading. The usual stuff. Everybody who was not a U.S. or Canadian citizen was to head for the dining car to fill in an additional green form.
In the dining car sat a cheerful looking family from the Middle East and a German man with a mouth in which a small frisbee could easily be inserted. I took the seat across the German, who had already filled in his green paper, and started on my own, dedicated, hoping to impress him. He was not throwing me friendly looks. The customs officer took the German's papers and welcomed him to America. They switched seats. He put his hands on the table and looked at me. We must have been of similar ages. He had a goatee and slid my passport towards him like it was a small gift.
I had not finished my novel yet, but my passport was complete. It was filled with pretty stamps. He did not like the stamps.
First, he saw my Sri Lankan stamp. The customs officer raised his eyebrows.
"Sri Lanka, what were you doing over there?"
"Surfing. Traveling. My best friend lives there. He is an architect."
The officer flipped on, seemingly satisfied. Secondly, he found my stamps from Singapore and Malaysia.
"What were you doing over there? Singapore and Malaysia? Aren't those countries Islamic?"
Looking over my shoulder, his eyes searched for his colleague's confirmation.
"Malaysia, I think so, yeah. But not Singapore. It's a melting pot. A very futuristic city. Airconditioned to the ceiling. To Singapore I went mostly for the food, to be honest."
"Sure."
"I'm sorry?"
"Nothing. And how about Malaysia?"
I explained flights departing from Malaysia were cheaper compared to Singapore. That I only went there for a few days, but also, a little bit, for the food. The customs officer went through some more pages. Then he found my Yemeni visa. He put my passport down and stared at me.
"What the hell were you doing in Yemen?"
"I went to the island Socotra, it's not on mainland Yemen. It's a small island closer to Somalia. A very special place, some call it 'Galapagos of the Middle East.' I think 85 percent of the plants and animals there, are indigenous."
"Weren't you scared?"
"Yeah. I was scared. When I was at the airport in mainland Yemen. That entire area is now taken by al Qaeda, I believe."
The customs officer was looking at my passport no longer. If he would have leafed through, he would have found Sharjah, Dubai and Abu Dhabi stamps.
That was the first time I had to open my suitcase. Six customs officers went through my two phones, iPad, laptop and camera. In my wallet they found an SD card I had totally forgotten about. They did not like that. By now I was the only one left in the dining car and the center of attention. I had put a raincoat in my suitcase, because I'd heard New Orleans tends to get hit by thunderstorms in the late summer. An officer held up the coat and barked:
"Who takes a coat to the U.S. in the summer?"
I answered it would keep me dry, in case the New Orleans levees would break again. The officer remained silent. He dropped my coat like a dishcloth.
The raincoat seemed to be the last straw. The customs officers exchanged looks.
"We'd like to ask you some more questions. But the train has to continue, so we're going to take you off here."
I looked out of the window. We weren't at a proper station. Along the tracks were piles of old pallets.
"Will you put me on another train, afterwards?"
"This is the only train. But in case we decide to let you in, we'll put you on a bus. Don't worry."
I started to worry. I packed my suitcase as quickly as possible and was escorted off the train. There were three officers in front of me, and three behind. My suitcase was too wide for the aisle, it kept getting stuck between the seats. I apologized to the train in general. While I struggled, the officers waited patiently and studied the relation between me and my suitcase.
Outside, we stopped in front of a white van. The officers permitted me to put my suitcase in the back and I was about climb into the van, when the they halted me.
"You are not under arrest. There is no need to be scared. But we would like to search you."
"I'm not scared. But it's kind of exciting. It's like I'm in a movie. You're just doing your job. I get that."
To me, that seemed the right attitude. They searched me for the first time then, just like in the movies. Before I climbed into the van, I had to give up my phones. I seemed unable to close my belt by myself, so an officer helped me out. This is when the sweating started.
In a little building made of corrugated tin, I opened my suitcase once more. Behind me, there was a man in tears. An officer was telling him about the prison sentence the man was looking forward to. He had been caught with a trunk full of cocaine. The man kept talking about a woman who seemed to be able to prove his innocence, but he was unable to reach her.
After that they searched me again. Thoroughly.
Just like in the movies.
In the room next to me they tried to take my fingerprints, but my hands were too clammy. It took half an hour. An officer said:
"He's scared."
Another officer confirmed:
"Yeah. He's scared."
I repeated, another attempt to be disarming:
"This is just like in the movies."
But border patrol is not easily disarmed.
In the five hours that followed, I was questioned twice more. During the first round I told, amongst others, my life's story, about my second novel's plot, gave my publisher's name, my bank's name and my real estate agent's name. Together we went through all the photos on my laptop and messages my phones had been receiving for the past months. They wrote down the names of everybody I had been in touch with. In my pirated software and movies they showed no interest.
During the second round of questioning, we talked about religion. I told them my mother was raised a Catholic, and that my dad had an atheist mother and a Jewish dad.
"We don't understand. Why would a Jew go to Yemen?"
"But... I'm not Jewish."
"Yeah, well. We just don't understand why would a Jew go to Yemen."
Again, I showed them the photos I took in Yemen and explained how nice the island's flora and fauna had been. That the dolphins come and hang out, even in the shallow water and how cheap the lobsters were. I showed them the Dragonblood trees and the Bedouin family where I had to eat goat intestines. They did not seem to appreciate it as much as I had.
"You yourself, what do you believe in?"
I thought about it for a second and replied.
"Nothing, really."
Obviously, I should have said:
"Freedom of speech."
When I'm supposed to watch my words, I tend to say the wrong ones.
The last hour was spent on phone calls about me. Now and then an officer came and asked me for a password on my equipment. By then, the cocaine trafficker had been brought to a cell where they did have a toilet. I continued my wait. An officer, who I had not seen before, flung the door open and asked if I was on the Greyhound heading to New York. I shrugged hopefully. He closed the door again, as if he had entered the wrong room.
Finally, two officers came rushing into my waiting room.
"You can pack your bag. And make sure you have everything."
They gave me my phones back. All apps had been opened. I had not used my phones that day, but the batteries were completely drained. Because I was soaked in sweat, I attempted to change shirts while packing my bag. It seemed like I had made it.
"How much time do we have? What time will the bus depart?"
"We don't know."
I was unable to find the entrance to my clean shirt. I held it high with two hands, as if it was a white flag.
"So... what's the verdict?"
"We are under the impression you have more ties with more countries we are not on friendly terms with than your own. We decided to bring you back to the Canadian border."
They brought me back. In the car, no words were said. It was no use. I was defeated. To the Canadian border they said:
"We got another one. This one is from the Netherlands."
The Canadian officer looked at me with pity. She asked if there was anything I needed. I said I could use some coffee and a cigarette. She took my passport to a back room and returned within five minutes, carrying an apologetic smile, a freshly stamped passport, coffee, a cigarette, and a ticket to the next bus back to Montreal.
I have been cursed at a Chinese border. In Dubai, my passport was studied by three veiled women for over an hour and my suitcase completely dismembered. In the Philippines I had to bribe someone in order to get my visa extended for a few days. Borders, they can be tough, especially in countries known for corruption.
But never, ever, will I return to the United States of America.

Why is the West trying to destroy Iran?

by Murtaza Hussain 

  

In 1920, the American historian Theodore Lothrop Stoddard published his famous work "The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World Supremacy [3]". The book is notable today for its frank discussion of the central role that racism played in geopolitics; especially in the context of the Western imperial project in Asia and Africa. In it Stoddard wrote:"The brown world, like the yellow world, is today in acute reaction against white supremacy … when faced by non-white opposition, white men have in the past instinctively tended to close their ranks against the common foe …. Future generations have a right to demand of us that they shall be born white in a white man's land."
While we rightly recoil today from the crude racial categorisations espoused by Stoddard, during his time, such views were extremely popular and were openly echoed at the highest echelons of political power. President Woodrow Wilson argued to his cabinet in 1917 that the United States must "keep the white race strong against the yellow [4]" and that "white civilisation and its domination of the planet rested largely on our ability to keep this country intact".
Going further, President Theodore Roosevelt openly discussed the benefits of "the expansion of the peoples of white, European, blood during the past four centuries [5]" and stated that in his view: "democracy needs no more complete vindication for its existence than the fact that it has kept for the white race the best portion of the new world's surface".
That such men were committed military imperialists [6] flowed naturally from their worldview; one in which the races of the world were organised into a clear hierarchy and where it was their prerogative to brutally subjugate all others.
While it has become impolitic to publicly express the same views today, contemporary events suggest that just beneath the surface the same impulses motivate many supposedly rational advocates of military action against "the brown world" in our own era.
Of Persian snake charmers
Where Roosevelt and Wilson inflicted the brunt of their violence on the peoples of Asia and on the "coloured" populations of their own nation [7], their modern heirs have in recent years directed their own state violence overwhelmingly against the peoples and nations of the Middle East.
The neoconservative hawks who were the architects of Iraq's destruction - apparently unfazed by their ghoulish record in this regard - have in recent years set their sights on the nation of Iran as their next target. To this end, crippling sanctions - designed to literally "take the food out of the Iranian peoples' mouths [8]" - have been implemented in an effort to inflict maximum suffering on the civilian population and to generate favourable conditions for another war. Disregard for the basic humanity of the many Iranians who will die in the course of such policies is a necessary accomplice to this project.
However, in recent weeks it would seem that a major setback has occurred to the neoconservative plan for another US war. A new Iranian government - conciliatory in its tone where its predecessor was shamelessly provocative - has come to power with the stated intention of reaching peaceful detente with the United States. Such a development necessarily makes the possibility of war more remote, and, to the chagrin of the neoconservatives, these overtures appear to have been cautiously welcomed [9] by the administration of President Barack Obama.
With their prized new war seemingly snatched from their grasp, it has been remarkable to watch the vast tantrum of anger and indignation among some hawks, in which the same racist beliefs which characterised past imperialism have bubbled back to the surface with remarkable speed.
From warnings to "beware of Persian snake charmers [10]", to allegations that for Iranians "deception is part of their DNA [11]", the prospect of a peaceful detente with Iran has brought out a seemingly inexhaustible cavalcade of frankly racist rhetoric.
As part of this campaign, long-time Pentagon official and neoconservative stalwart Harold Rohde has published a helpful primer on the apparently-monolithic "Iranian mind" and the dangers it poses in any negotiation. According to Rohde: [12]
"Compromise (as we in the West understand this concept) is seen as a sign of submission and weakness. When the West establishes itself as the most powerful force and shows strength and resolve, Iranians will most likely come on board ... it is for this reason that measures of good-will and confidence-building should be avoided at all costs."
In this are clear echoes of the stunningly ignorant claim - popularised during the era of the Iraq War - that "Arabs only understand force [13]", and that thus uniquely among human beings, they are incapable of appreciating empathy or conciliation.
Similarly, according to this overtly racist argument, Iranians too are unlike any other humans on Earth and are in fact more akin to animals or small children who must be shown firm discipline as opposed to respect or decency in the course of any negotiation.
With remarkably ignorant worldviews such as these informing their strategies, it is unsurprising that US foreign policy in the Middle East has been such a catastrophic failure over the past decade.
Dispatches from 'the villa in the jungle'
On October 1, Binyamin Netanyahu attended the UN General Assembly [14] to deliver an unapologetically aggressive, demeaning and hostile speech directed towards the just-elected president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. In his address Netanyahu used language completely alien to the typically careful discourse of international diplomacy, calling Rouhani "a wolf in sheep's clothing", characterising him as an untrustworthy liar, and bizarrely stating at one point that "Rouhani thinks he can have his yellowcake [uranium] and eat it too". It is difficult to imagine such language openly directed against any other elected leader in a diplomatic forum such as this.
But as a representative of Ehud Barak's "villa in the jungle [15]" and the state that Theodor Herzl correctly said would exist as "a rampart of Europe against Asia", Netanyahu was not alone in his overt condescension towards Iran and the Iranian people. A senior Israeli official also advised his US counterparts not to trust any Iranian offers of dialogue as "Persians have been using these [duping] tactics for thousands of years, before America came to be [16]".
The darkly humorous coda to this spectacle was Netanyahu's suggestion - days later - that  he would "consider" taking a phone call [17] from Rouhani if one were proffered. Ostensibly, this consideration would come only if the Iranian president were to grovel on his knees and beg for such an opportunity, even in the wake of Netanyahu's unabashed insults and threats towards him.
Live on your knees
In this episode one can glimpse a microcosm of a dynamic that has long been at play in the Middle East. For many, what is desired with Iran is not peaceful negotiation but rather total capitulation. In this view detente would be a failure; what is required is to utterly crush any "Asiatic" country that dares to wield an independent foreign policy in a region otherwise populated by pitiful satrapies.
It's not enough that Rouhani says he wants peace; he must first acquiesce to the absolute subjugation and humiliation of the nation of Iran as a precondition for any negotiation. Indeed, regardless of the government in power, Iran has long been the target of similar malice whenever it has sought to assert its own rights as a sovereign nation.
In the 1950s the liberal, secular, and democratically elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh was faced with almost identical rhetoric as that which Rouhani's government receives today. Before being deposed by a brutal CIA-orchestrated coup, Mossadegh was described in Western press accounts as [18] "an incorruptible fanatic", "impervious to common sense" and a man who by nationalising his country's oil had "issued a defiant challenge that sprang out of a hatred and envy almost incomprehensible to the West".
That Mossadegh was an admirer of the US and a committed democrat made little difference. For the crime of asserting Iran's right to its own natural resources, he and his elected government were utterly destroyed. As Christopher de Bellaigue noted in his seminal work on the topic [19]: "there was disquiet across the white world", about Mossadegh's "show of Oriental bad form".
The religiosity or lack thereof of Mossadegh's rule was completely irrelevant in this formulation. For this reason it can be seen why contemporary Iranian religious leaders such as Ali Khamenei - born out of the blood and ashes of Iran's recent past - have so forcefully and repeatedly sought to convey the message to the United States that: [20] "We are not liberals like [Salvador] Allende or Mossadegh whom the CIA can snuff out."
Racism and war
As much as it did during the time of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the prime impulse behind military imperialism (in addition to seemingly insatiable greed) has always been a barely concealed racism towards the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Liberal Western thinkers have at certain points in history succeeded in checking the most heinous and self-destructive impulses of the hawks who feed off of endless war, but they persist in their machinations nonetheless. As the Iraq War demonstrated, such actors can still exert their will onto the world [21] when circumstances are right.
While we like to believe the polite fiction that our policymakers are generally intelligent, reasoned and rational, at certain moments the mask slips and we learn that of the crude bigotry and arrogance which informs much war advocacy. We discover that the reason war is apparently both necessary and desirable [22] is due to the deficient DNA of foreigners; to their incurable Oriental untrustworthiness [23] and their fanatic desire to assert their own national sovereignty.
While in many ways civilisation has matured, the racist impulse - so clearly articulated by Roosevelt and Wilson - to subjugate and destroy the disobedient peoples of far flung lands has not dissipated in some quarters. It would be prudent to recognise it today for what it is, lest the horrendous crimes of the recent past be repeated.

Columbus did not discover the Americas.

By Joanna Eede 

 

Stop Saying Columbus 'Discovered' the Americas—It Erases Indigenous History

October 11, 2013  |  

Just over a hundred years ago in Peru, a tall history professor from Yale University left his camp in a valley northwest of Cusco, and walked through cloud forest to a mountain ridge more than 7,500 feet above sea level. There, high above the roaring Urubamba river, he found an ancient stone citadel; sculpted terraces of temples and tombs, granite buildings and polished walls that were covered in centuries of vines and vegetation.
Hiram Bingham had stumbled across the Inca site of Machu Picchu, the site he believed to be the ‘Lost city of the Incas’. ‘Machu Picchu might prove to be the largest and most important ruin discovered in South America since the days of the Spanish conquest,’ he wrote in the 1913 edition of the National Geographic.
But his words were misleading. Bingham hadn’t ‘discovered’ Machu Picchu. Nor was it ‘lost’. He may have alerted it to the western scientific world – for there were no accounts of it in the chronicles of the Spanish invaders – but local tribes must have been aware of its existence. Yet Christopher Heaney, a Fellow at the University of Texas and author of a book on Hiram Bingham, claims the historian was amazed to discover an indigenous family close to the citadel. ‘When he climbed the mountain he was very surprised to find an Indian family at the top of the ridge,’ he said. Why Bingham was surprised is bewildering in itself.
It is unlikely that his terminology had adverse ramifications for the local indigenous peoples, but the language of colonists has long had a tragic part to play in the destruction of tribal peoples across the world. For centuries, tribal lands have been referred to as ‘empty’ in order to justify their theft for commercial, military or conservation reasons. After all, if a region is uninhabited, so the expedient thinking goes, there are by definition no human rights to address. Similarly, racist prejudices – the labeling of tribal peoples as ‘backward’, ‘uncivilized’ or ‘savage’ – have inculcated a popular attitude of disrespect and fear, so underpinning (and even justifying, in the perpetrator’s mind), the appalling treatment to which tribal peoples have been subjected.
When European settlers landed on the shores of Australia, they claimed the land was ‘terra nullius’ – land belonging to no one. It wasn’t. The Aboriginal people had lived there for perhaps 50,000 years yet the concept of ‘terra nullius’ was only properly overthrown in 1992, allowing the lands to be stolen legitimately from the people who had first occupied the continent. Under British colonial law, Aboriginal people had no rights; they were deemed too ‘primitive’ to be owners. In just over 100 years from the first invasion, the Aboriginal population was reduced from an estimated one million to only 60,000.
Similarly, when the trade winds carried Christopher Columbus to the ‘New World’ in 1492, he had in fact arrived in the homelands of peoples who had lived there for millennia: tribes who had their own successful laws, rituals, beliefs, values, ways of life and religions. ‘The whites shout out today, “We discovered the land of Brazil,”’ says Davi Kopenawa, a Yanomami spokesman, ‘as if it were empty! As if human beings hadn’t lived in it since the beginning of time!’ a thought echoed by Megaron Txukarramae, a Kayapo Indian when he said, ‘The land that the whites called Brazil belonged to the Indians. You invaded it and took possession of it.’
The reality of course is that South and North America were not ‘new,’ Australia was not ‘empty’ before Europeans arrived and Machu Picchu was not ‘discovered’ in 1911. ‘The phrase ‘discovery’ of America is obviously inaccurate,’ wrote the linguist and philosopher Professor Noam Chomsky. ‘What they discovered was an America that had been discovered thousands of years before by its inhabitants. Thus what took place was the invasion of America – an invasion by a very alien culture.’
These lands were the homes of indigenous peoples. To claim a land was ‘empty’ before the invasion of colonists and ‘discovered’ once they arrived is to rob tribal peoples of their identity, dignity and land rights; it is to deny their very existence.
They are still the homes of indigenous peoples. In the summer of 2013, Peru’s Prime Minister announced that his government has scrapped an official report warning of the dangers a controversial gas project poses to uncontacted tribes, and at least three ministers resigned amidst growing pressure to approve the project. The UN has called for the project’s ‘immediate suspension’. The invasion of their lands continues; their existence and rights overlooked.

Muhammad goes to Allah on a flying horse.

Muslims believe that Muhammad, their prophet, went up to God on a flying horse. This set me thinking: What about all these Muslim sinners? Will they go up on flying pigs after they die?

Muslim women's veil.

 The Muslim women's veil, contrary to what Muslims believe, has little to do with their religion. The veil actually predates Islam by many centuries. In the Near East it was the Assyrian kings who first introduced the veil. Prostitutes and slaves, however, were told not to veil, and were slashed if they disobeyed this law.

Beyond the Near East, the practice of hiding one's face appeared in classical Greece, in the Byzantine Christian world, in Persia, and in India among upper caste Rajput women. Muslims in their first century didn't give a hoot about the female dress. When the niece of one of the prophet's many wives, Aisha bint Talha, was asked by her husband Musab to veil her face, she told him, "Since the Almighty has made me beautiful it is my wish that the public should view my beauty. On no account, therefore, will I veil myself."

As Islam reached other lands, regional practices, including the covering of women, were adopted by the early Muslims. Yet it was only in the second Islamic century that the veil became common, first used among the powerful and the rich as a status symbol.