Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Interrogated at Schiphol Airport

Last weekend I reported on the ideological screening meted out to Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff at the Miami airport when she arrived in the United States to speak at the launch of The United West.

A Dutch delegate to the same event underwent something similar, only his experience took place on the other side of the Atlantic, just prior to his departure from the Netherlands. It’s significant — and ominous — that he was grilled by both Dutch security officers and US Immigration officials at Schiphol Airport. When he arrived in Florida he was also questioned by representatives of the Department of Homeland Security.

It doesn’t require a full-fledged case of paranoia to recognize that something funny was going on in Amsterdam last Thursday. The Dutch and the Americans were obviously co-ordinating their efforts, and each group was reading from the same playbook — one written by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Here’s the Dutch delegate’s report of what happened:

Dear friends,

When I showed up at Schiphol (Amsterdam) Airport on March 3 for my travel to Florida the following most strange discussions occurred.

At the gate Dutch people were interviewing all passengers who wanted to board. As soon as I showed my documents that dealt with the meeting I was attending, the supervisor took over the questioning and wanted to know why this meeting was being held.

I explained it was about the threat of Shariah and radical Islam.

The next question was: “Can you give an example of that?” The hairs rose on my neck upon hearing that question; it was as if I had to take an exam on the topic.

As I’m a very simple man with some feeling of honor, I immediately replied: “What kind of question is that?”

The supervisor became angry: “I think that’s a very good question.”

Since I really wanted to get on the plane I decided to play along and answered him: “There is a plan to make it illegal to speak negatively about Allah or Muhammad.”

The supervisor followed up by asking: “Who is doing that?”

I answered: “The OIC, the Organization of the Islamic Conference.”

The supervisor was still not satisfied and asked: “Which Dutch political parties are backing this?”

I replied: “The Christian Union is not against it.”

The supervisor: “Ah, a truly important party, but not really.”

Me: “They also force halal food upon others.”

He: “So what? Isn’t there also kosher food and Hindu food?”

I understood by now that this man just wanted to prove how wrong I was, and wasn’t interested in performing his job: looking for potential terrorists or other unwanted passengers.

Me: “One is never forced to eat kosher food, now, is one?”

The supervisor now wanted to know if I was a member of the EDL, a name he had seen on my documents.

I explained the EDL has no official members and yes, I’m a sympathizer of the Dutch and English Defence Leagues.

That was it: I had to be searched from top to toe. In addition, another man took over the questioning. He wanted to know if I publicized the meeting. I said no, because I had the feeling he was trying to make me look like a journalist — and it is illegal to work as a journalist in the US without permission. He remarked that I had an expensive hobby and said after reading my documents that I could also do all that by e-mail communication and therefore didn’t need to travel to the US.

When all this was over, an officer from US immigration wanted to speak with me. The plane was now almost leaving. He tried to lecture me that Islamic terrorists are actually crazies, and their acts have nothing to do with Islam. He asked me: “Don’t you know that Christianity is also violent, don’t you know about the Crusades?”

I explained him I had no problem with peaceful Muslims, just with political Islam. He said that what I was doing is “discrimination.” He asked: “Do you use violence?” I reassured him that I would never do that.

Upon arriving in the US, I was sent to an office of Homeland Security and asked questions about my role in obtaining donations for my American friends.

15 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow.


everything was bad, but the crusades?

a christiaqn response to agressive islamic expansion that turned many countries from christian to muslim at the point of a sword, and it happened 1000 years ago is the aquivelent of what muslims are doing right now?!

and they are murdering christians by the hudreds all over the world right now.

kind of dificult to say its just a few crazies when 15,000 muslims rallied together to kill christians in egypt just this week.

Anonymous said...

First ESW and now this bloke.
We all know the kind of repression we are now living under. Its now no longer of benefit to impale oneself on the spears of such officialdom. Why not copy our opponents and simply use some stealth. Well ESW cannot help people knowing who she is, but why arent others simply more circumspect and say they are going for a holiday. Keep political papers out of sight or on a memory card.

Ex-Dissident said...

I don't think the Dutch were ever famous for being polite. Nevertheless I would have probably reacted as thunderpuss suggests: basically tell the person that I am traveling for a holiday and try to get on the plane with as little hassle as possible. I wonder if such approach is very prudent though. Eventually someone will need to make a stand. Thank God for ESW.

Michael Servetus said...

Since I really wanted to get on the plane I
decided to play along and answered him :
“ There is a plan to make it illegal to speak
negatively about Allah or Muhammad. ”
The supervisor followed up by asking: “ Who
is doing that ?”

An obvious immediate answer would have been to say ---you.

And again we read of the indiscriminate use of the catch all phrase discrimination. The indiscriminate use of the word discrimination is in itself a technique of discrimination because it is used selectively. That would then seem at first glance to be contradictory but it is not if we can understand how the indiscriminate use of the word discrimination can at the same time be discriminately applied.
Another thing. Islam has historically been something. This officer is somehow looking at it as right now clean detached from history, one could even say reality. As though Islam has no track record of its own and no self responsibility. One might as well be a Muslim to look at it that way, it is a refusal to see it through Western eyes as though that were a biased view. No that is a reality a Western reality. To be Muslim means to not to be a Christian or Jew very specifically. If a person cannot see Islam for what it is it is because they have adopted a Islamic position or non Western one. They think by some magic that this alters reality but it does not because even if they refuse to look at it through Western reality they still live in Western reality. All that they have succeeded in doing is refused to take sides and pretend to be in some neutral middle while all their possessions and bodily properties are living moving and breathing in Western reality. But see how disturbing it is to know we have a government bureaucracy that is busy playing such a mental game with our lives and property.

Blogger said...

The crusades are not a command in the bible. They were carried out in the name of Christianity when noone could either read nor own a bible (since the printing press hadn't yet been invented). Even if they were literate, they would not understand the Latin it was written in. When Martin Luther finally translated the bible directly from Greek, he found that there was no such thing as doing war as repayment for sin.

However, once the masses could read the Quran, they stopped believing the Imams telling them Islam was peaceful, because it is written in black and white that you DO get to heaven through dying in battle, that you must slay infidels, and ... I think this is the worst verse of the Quran ... "sin is worse than mass slaughter". (2:191)

So, in the end, the Christian who commits violence can be rehabilitated when brought back to his or her own holy book. But how can you rehabilitate muslims who commit violence? Bring them back to their holy book and it tells its followers to kill for "those who make war on Allah and Muhammad".

Anonymous said...

So now freedom of travel is subjected to one's political opinions. And you have political komissars in airports doing thought control.

All that in "free" and "democratic" countries.

I'd rather have miradors, minefields and border guards shooting on sight -- on people trying to get out. At least, it would be more honest.

Professor L said...

It's interesting also that people fail to mention that the First Crusade (and the four others that followed it with Papal approval) were answers to the Byzantine Empire's call for aid. Of course, to point that out means that there was something threatening the "urbane" Byzantines (they are certainly considered more civilised than the knights of the West, who are characterised as little more than barbaric brutes with crosses), and said something was expansionist Islam.

But that also requires a bit on historical knowledge, and oh, how little we have of the so-called dark and middle ages.

Anonymous said...

Exactly on what basis should anyone be prepared to be REQUIRED to defend our philosophical or political positions at "checkpoints"?

I tend to support anything that promotes examination of our personal opinions: This on not one. This is very ominous.

Who among us is willing to discard our well-planned appointments and schedules to fight such a battle? We must come to such "checkpoints" prepared for such questions. I smell Fascism.

Michael Servetus said...

Militant Islam which is to to say Islam period, there being no other type, only a matter of whether active or inactive, is indeed a pressing and looming threat that we can see coming in the not too distant future. But what is an even more pressing and immediate matter requiring urgent attention are our own governing bodies. They are leftist organs of state no longer representing the people or even the state but rather ideologies separated from the people and even reality. If it is even possible to conceive the state doesn't even represent itself anymore because under the ever leavening influence of leftist memes actually consider it a virtue to be neutral players, without any side to which they owe particular allegiance. Now that might be a nice harmless thing to do theoretically in private as a individual but not as a state. Moreover they also somehow play the role of being in the shoes of the other person and are consequently not even on their own side. But as I said above this is just a game to them, that they dangerously play in their minds while their goods and lives are living in and under Western reality and protection. This refusal to take sides is of course a choice and taking of a side in itself by default and it is that of the enemy. How can a government be neutral between an enemy and its own people? To me this is a inner conflict that is a result of teaching Marxist communism ideas in classrooms without an accompanying critique and leaving it as just another alternative or point of view. Another cause in my opinion is that the push and forced acceptance and toleration to tacit approval of homosexuality as a process mirrors this one and has contributed to that mental state. Its all about talking oneself into accepting things that don't make sense and pretending they do. This leads to confusion and defensive protective paralysis and or neutralization.

Hesperado said...

Exactly on what basis should anyone be prepared to be REQUIRED to defend our philosophical or political positions at "checkpoints"?

Let's not get ahead of ourselves. It's perfectly logical for personnel at checkpoints to be doing this kind of thing -- under the logic of PC MC.

And remember, PC MC is not a Leftist regime: it is the voluntary set of axiomatic thoughts and feelings that has been adopted by the hearts and minds of millions of Westerners, including the majority of conservatives and non-elites. Not all these millions believe the exact same set of PC MC axioms -- but when it comes to Islam and Muslims (and the self-criticial revisionist history of the West that is the flip side of its coin) there does tend to be a remarkable unanimity across the board throughout the West.

Thus, the logic of these personnel at these checkpoints becomes clear:

1) only a TMOE (Tiny Minority of Extremists among Muslims) are a terrorist threat

2) the ideology driving the TMOE has nothing to do with Islam

3) the vast majority of Muslims are decent "moms and pops like the rest of us" (care of yours truly, George Bush)

4) the tendency to conflate the TMOE with that vast majority of hundreds of millions of decent "moms and pops" around the world can all too easily lead to White Western crimes against all these lovely Ethnic Peoples -- including lynching, rounding up, internment camps, genocide.

5) another danger we have to watch out for, therefore (even if we haven't seen any concrete signs of it yet) are white anti-Muslim bigots who might become terrorists themselves in order to advance their bigoted cause against Islam.

6) And don't forget the paradoxical dynamic of PC MC (which follows Auster's Law of Majority-Minority Relations): the worse that Muslims behave around the world (the more attacks and other shows of hatred, intolerance and violence they exhibit), the stronger the PC MC reflexes become, not the weaker, as one would rationally assume. This too is logical, since the increasing data of bad Muslim behavior puts incredible strain on the weaknesses of the PC MC paradigm, and the natural instinct of true believers is to defend before thinking through.

1-6 = Anyone at checkpoints who shows signs of anti-Muslim bias could be a danger. Copy that.

It's getting ahead of ourselves, therefore, to think this augurs (or expresses a current) Leftist Fascist control of the West. It is simply an unremarkable concretization of PC MC.

While the behavior of that one particular checkpoint official is repellant and egregious --

an officer from US immigration wanted to speak with me. The plane was now almost leaving. He tried to lecture me that Islamic terrorists are actually crazies, and their acts have nothing to do with Islam. He asked me: “Don’t you know that Christianity is also violent, don’t you know about the Crusades?”

-- it would be going too far to demonize such an all-too common type as a "Leftist Elite Fascist Guard", when in fact, such a type is our neighbor, our brother, our schoolmate, our colleage at work -- any one of whom (or if you're as unlucky as me, nearly all of them) if we ever get in a conversation with them about the problem of Islam, to our increasing frustration and growing infuriation, pretty much parrots exactly the same thing as this immigration official.

Baron Bodissey said...

Hesperado --

You left one out:

7) If we focus on the tiny minority of extremists and continue talking about Islamic terrorists, we risk driving non-violent Muslims into the arms of extremists, turning them into terrorists. By our Islamophobic behavior, we may unwittingly increase the incidence of terrorism.

I'm not making this up -- I'm paraphrasing it from official US government policy.

babs said...

Yes Baron,
I do believe a high ranking Obama official said exactly that in regard to the Peter King inquiries a few days ago. So, we all must be very quiet lest we make more terrorists!
Seriously though, in 2003 I flew from JFK to Heathrow on my way to Scotland. I was disturbed by the police with machine guns in the airport. While transfering to a domestic flight to Glasgow I was interviewed by someone that went over every single stamp in my passport; when did you go there, why did you go there, etc. It was very disturbing.

Zenster said...

Baron Bodissey: By our Islamophobic behavior, we may unwittingly increase the incidence of terrorism.

Priceless. In order to test the logic of that statement, let's examine the converse of its declaration.

Does Islamophilic behavior reduce "the incidence of terrorism"?

Does appeasing Muslim sensitivities cause a decrease in jihadist activities?

Or, when Muslim activities go unobstructed and unmonitored, instead of any moderation in their behavior, do they tend to continue or expand jihadist efforts that can thereby become even more dangerous due to a lack of any surveillance?

One may as well claim that fewer police patrols will decrease crime rates. Yeesh!

Hesperado said...

Ah yes Baron, #7 is part of it.

The silver lining of all this is that PC MC is incoherent. I.e., the very fact that it is incoherent shows that the rational concern about Muslims is part of their equation. If it weren't, there wouldn't be an incoherence, and they would simply be pro-Muslim. But they are not simply that way: their own concern about the data of Muslims remains suppressed, but continues to exert influence on their behavior. For example: that typical immigration official can't help being concerned every time he sees a Muslim in an airport, and even if he tries to suppress the natural rational response to this datum, it still tugs away at him, deep down.

The PC MC is primarily fighting himself, not us; because he knows, deep down, we are right, and that he is one of us. The problem is, how deep down is this psychological honesty buried? This varies from person to person. With Leftists, the psychological solution is virtually hopeless. With PC MCs, I maintain there is still hope for the majority of them; and thankfully, they outnumber Leftists in the West.

Unknown said...

Much sympathy and appreciation for your counter-jihadism Elisabeth. From the Netherlands.

These @ssholes clearly misuse the power they were granted. They are not to lecture people, but to do their tasks, which in all fairness does not require a lot of education in the Netherlands. Thus it also makes little sense for them to lecture.

I hope that when you encounter these individuals in your traveling, this doesn't demotivate you, cause what you are doing is very much needed. Too bad we don't know which Dutch delegate was involved, but I feel the same gratitude towards him/her.

Shirai, DutchDefenceLeague.

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