Avoid Heathrow Airport in London UK at all costs

[mahleu]

Great. London is plagued with black on black crime with kids getting shot or knifed every day. Black kids get stopped and questioned but the police get cursed for stopping black kids; Asian people get stopped and questioned because of the current terrorist problems and then complain that more Asians are stopped than Europeans - would the police, then, be doing a better job by stopping more blue-eyed blondes?

I´m sorry, my man, but comes a time when your own survival depends on seeing the obvious.

Rob C
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You have to ask yourself if you would feel the same if your race/religion/whatever was suddenly being targetted by excessive security. Would you accept it and say it was for the best, or would you argue that just because a minority is causing trouble you shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush?

[Rob C]

You have to ask yourself if you would feel the same if your race/religion/whatever was suddenly being targetted by excessive security. Would you accept it and say it was for the best, or would you argue that just because a minority is causing trouble you shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush?
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I think the question is pointless: if it were my race/group that was carrying out religious terrorism then I would be far from surprised to find myself subject to closer scrutiny than I might like. The answer is for those ethnic/religious groupings to clean up their own acts, something which would earn them both the respect and gratitude which I think they both would like.

Pretending that such groups are not visibly obvious is to fly in the face of reality: would you suggest the security forces look the other way, turn blind eyes or simply hope the problem goes away?

Of course not all are guilty of either terrorism or violence; that was never suggested or implied. But you do have to look for trouble where you will find the ones causing it.

Rob C

[mahleu]

I think the question is pointless: if it were my race/group that was carrying out religious terrorism then I would be far from surprised to find myself subject to closer scrutiny than I might like. The answer is for those ethnic/religious groupings to clean up their own acts, something which would earn them both the respect and gratitude which I think they both would like.

Pretending that such groups are not visibly obvious is to fly in the face of reality: would you suggest the security forces look the other way, turn blind eyes or simply hope the problem goes away?

Of course not all are guilty of either terrorism or violence; that was never suggested or implied. But you do have to look for trouble where you will find the ones causing it.

Rob C
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The current crackdown on security was the result of actions by less than a 100 people, out of an entire ethnic group that seems like a very poor sample. Suggesting that ethnicities or religious groups should clean up suggests that they are cohesive movements but as you know this is not the case. How can an average muslim in britain have any effect on what muslims are doing elseware in the world? Why should he have to? Most liberal countries claim equality before the law as a fundamental right, how can it then be permissable to target people because they look 'middle-eastern'?

[Diapositivo]

Provided there is a rationale, a statistic rationale, "targeting" and "screening" is good.

If let's say drug is more often entering a country "A" from planes or ships coming from let's say countries B and C, then it is obvious that planes and ships coming from countries B and C are screened with an added attention. So it is rationale that the police have their nice dogs sniffing at all bags and at your person when you come from said countries. I wouldn't mind because I see a reason in this.

Lack of reasons puts me off. The fact that the 80 years old lady is deprived of the cane so that it is also politically correct to deprived a 20 years old hooligan of the cane, that is not rational. Police have to be effective, not politically correct.

If a minority is "targeted" because it is statistically more prone to certain form of crimes, it is rational to "screen" that minority with an added degree of attention. Provided things are done with the brain turned on.

I am afraid that the British way of doing things is that they want to be *perfectly* safe and they also want to be *politically correct*. That does not work. Actually I think the world would be a better place if we all tried to be politically uncorrect when it is needed.

I have felt and feel part of a targeted minority in at least three occasions:

During the Moro affair, for those who know, I was a child, on a trip from my house on the countryside to Rome, my car with caravan added was stopped some four or five times by the "casual" checks of the police: any time with their machine gun straight on your front. That means a stop every 20 or 30 kilometers. The policement were quite nervous while they were opening the caravan door. Had they been the same policemen of London underground, we would have been killed many times. Nonetheless, it made a lot of sense, in that circumstance, to check every caravan and nobody complained in my family that we were stopped so many times (and shown the inside of the firing mouth).

I take pictures of architectural elements in Rome: monuments and buildings of various interest. Invariably I am questioned and often prevented from taking pictures by policemen when I take pictures with a tripod. In the meanwhile 20 tourists pass along and take snapshots. That makes no sense: if I want to take a picture for whatever devious purpose, I can take it with my portable phone. But some guys in uniform deem necessary to prevent people with tripods to take pictures. That is a kind of absurd behaviour which is not condoned by any kind of danger, because it is irrational, and it would remain irrational even if a terrorist threw an atomic bomb at Fontana di Trevi.

I can live with being stopped and pointed a machine gun over when I go round with a caravan and a prominent political figure has been kidnapped and there is intelligence he is moved somewhere, but I cannot stand to be prevented from taking pictures with a tripod "for security reason" when every 5 minutes 100 "possible criminals" are taking the same picture without any problem.

The third case is that I am constantly stopped by police at night when I come back home: youngish thank goodness, old car, bearded, waxed raincoat, I must look "alternative" to the average Carabiniere: they stop me and very kindly ask for my documents: in doing so, I can perfectly see their nose "sniffing" inside the car, in search of marijuana!

I know they would stop me. I have learned to make diversions because I also know where they place themselves.

It's a slowly progressing world

Cheers
Fabrizio

[mahleu]

I guess living in South Africa has overly sensitised me to the dangers of treating different people differently based on their looks.

[michael]

Since this conversation has now diverged sufficiently from matters related to photography I have decided to close the thread.

Michael