The Human Spirit: Who is the Enemy?

Aug 4, 2004

By BARBARA SOFER

Picture this scene. Newark International Airport in New Jersey. As usual, I'm tapped out of the line for additional security check. Either my head covering or my American passport issued in Jerusalem places me on the dangerous passenger list. I'm usually good-natured about this. After all, who understands the importance of security better than an Israeli? I'm nimble, and I'm prepared. To save time, I wear shoes with Velcro bands. I easily stretch my arms, doing the cha cha in footprint markers, and I've even been asked to flip the waistband on my skirt.

This time, I actually hear one of the security men order another "to pick the one in the red cap for selection." Selection, mind you, not inspection. The word does get my Jewish back up. Then, not one, but two chairs are set up in the restricted section. I've been selected and so has a fellow El Al passenger, Shoshana Weinstein.

Readers of this column will remember Shoshana's unusual story. Her son Adam, 14, went off with friends for ice cream and pizza on Ben-Yehuda Street in Jerusalem on Saturday night December 1, 2001. At half past eleven his mother felt a wave of fear and called him. She heard teenagers laughing in the background. He assured her he was okay and that he loved her. Shortly afterwards, along with a quorum of other teens, he was murdered by a bomber.

Even in the midst of their sorrow, Shoshana then 48, and her husband Dov, decided to try to have another child. When Shoshana was 50, a perfectly formed little girl was born. The Weinsteins named her Eden, home of the biblical Adam. Eden had Adam's dimple in her chin.

Shoshana was invited to the United States to share her story. So here she is, with little English, clutching eight-month-old Eden, after the 11-hour flight, selected for a close inspection by New Jersey guards.

I go through my hand-lifts, then put my right foot in and put the right foot out to hokey pokey rhythm. One of my Jerusalem sandals with a cracked sole is a source of particular concern for the authorities, who bend it back and peer inside the rubber. Then the inspectors decide I pass muster and turn to Shoshana and Eden.

Shoshana looks panicky. I request the supervisor. One of the inspectors insists he's in charge, but when I jot down his name he summons the genuine overseer. I express my sympathy for security checks but swiftly relate Shoshana's story so that they can see she is a victim, not a perpetrator. The supervisor shakes her head and says a phrase that is well-worn on her tongue and which she expects to quell resistance. "We're only following orders that come down from Washington." And so, homeland security puts Shoshana through a full security check, taking away her baby so they can do many complete turns of the metal-detecting wand. At last, Eden herself needs to be examined. Over and over, she is held up to be examined.

SECURITY HAS become an excuse for rudeness and obtuseness. Much of the security personnel take on a menacing stance, and airline personnel have been infected by this puffed-up militarism, too. On a recent trip, my daughter stuck up for a physically challenged person whose flight was long delayed by suggesting that the company provide shelter in their airport lounge. An American West clerk warned that she could be "removed" for interfering.

But beyond this, there is the terrible sense that no one understands who the enemy is. Homeland security doesn't have to be wasting time checking Israelis, showing it's an equal opportunity examiner of Middle Easterners, nor wasting time going for metal particles among an Israeli baby's diapers.

You have to understand who the enemy is before you can deter a threat. Has thinking really become so clouded that the mind can't close around the recognition that the killers who murdered nearly 3,000 people were extremist Arabs? What kind of reasoning insists that an eight-month-old baby girl, brought into life to give new meaning for a family that has suffered the greatest price of the unchecked hatred, might be packed with explosives? It's not as if the security personnel didn't know who that baby was. I told them. Although the lowest level security official might be following a checklist, the supervisor should have been able to think this through.

There's a parallel to this encounter in the story of Ann Robinson-Peter, the American graphic artist detained and initially denied entry into Israel because she was connected to the International Solidarity Movement. In interviews, Robinson-Peter insisted that watching the Twin Towers crumble began her personal odyssey. I suspect that all the tiptoeing around the identity of the mass murderers, that they were all militant Muslims, led to that journey – not to oppose terror and its perpetrators but to study Arabic with a Palestinian teacher and identify herself with Palestinian causes. The logic is flawed.

If the free world cannot differentiate between the righteous and the enemy, then the forces of evil will do that for us.