Tuesday, October 14, 2008

On travelling with an Arab "passport"

I sit with the man and his wife, and countless others, for hours on end. We are all the same, we speak the same language. It is only as we are about to land that I notice a nervous activity as people begin to fill landing cards. These people are unfortunate enough to have the wrong paper work. They are flying with Arab passports. There are usually two ways many people decide to approach this. One is that Arabs are being unfairly targeted, that we have been given a bad name, or simply that we should do more to be accepted into this system and so that people finally see us as the same as everyone else, so that our "passport" regains its value and respect which it so deserves. I for one don't care, I'll use the devil's passport to fly into his country. The acceptance that those people crave means that they surrender to this unfair "international" system, one which is designed to forever keep imperialists on top.

The logic of this system goes like this: You must never break the rules of the system, otherwise you risk chaos and many bad things will happen. If I break the system, it is in order to save it. Without the system you are all jeapardised. So I break the system for your own good, in other words, I am the system. You must protect me as I protect myself.

The only way to get out of this mess is to simply play the system and stop being stupid. Just get that meaningless piece of paper which will get you out of trouble and make your life easier when you travel. Force the system to discriminate against you again but this time in the open and because of your skin colour, religion or ethnicity or your financial status - the way it always has. At least this way everybody gets to see it for what it is, a big fat lie.

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