The color of truth is always gray

Now, I want to be safe in the air and I do not mind sacrificing some of my privacy — although I do not know, exactly, what it is I am sacrificing at an airport checkpoint. Let us assume, though, that some people feel strongly that their privacy and dignity are being compromised by full-body scanning. I respect their views, but they have no right to ask me — and others — to take greater risks with our lives because of their strongly held views with regard to privacy.

It was the same with smokers: I respect the rights of smokers, but they have no right to make me into a second-hand smoker and heighten my risk of dying of lung cancer.

Which brings us to the experiment some airlines conducted in the late 1980s. If there are enough people who feel uncomfortable about being searched by TSA officers, they should find a way to band together – this is much easier today, in the Internet age – and pool their resources, and then persuade the airlines to have a few privacy-protected flights a day. These flights will carry passengers who were not subjected to intrusive TSA screening.

This way, those who feel especially aggrieved by intrusive airport searches – and who are willing to take greater risks by sharing a plane with passengers who, too, would not be subjected to thorough security inspection – would fly according to their values.

There are few issues to be addressed: the airlines are not likely to risk their expensive planes on such an experiment; it is not very likely that pilots will agree to fly such a plane; the passengers will have to sign waivers so no one – the airlines, the government – would be held liable if the plane were brought down by a bomber on board; and more.

The principle, though, is simple: people have a right to hold whatever beliefs they want to hold, but they do not have the right to impose these beliefs – or the consequences of these beliefs – on others. We live in a democracy, so subject to constitutional limitations, the majority imposes its preferences on the minority. All the polls show that the most travelers, in one way or another, are willing to sacrifice some privacy in order to gain more security.

Without addressing every detail of what TSA and its employees do on the front lines, we can say that TSA does nothing more or nothing less than what the majority of travelers want it to do.

Those who engage in headline-grabbing anti-TSA stunts at airports – like having the Fourth Amendment written on their chests or underwear, or yelling “don’t touch my junk” at a TSA employee – should address their complaints to the voters, not to the agency carrying out its mandate.

One more note: One of the less appealing aspects of some of those engaged in these stunts is that they assume an air of moral superiority. They have managed to convince themselves that they occupy a rarified moral high-ground, while the rest of us are more like sheep, mindlessly following orders and obeying authority as our rights are being sacrificed.

These stuntmen should be brought back to earth. They have decided to occupy an arid and sterile milieu where everything is black or white, right or wrong, and there are never any conflicts among competing values, like privacy and security.

Life is complex, and compromises must be made. The majority of travelers are not mindless sheep. Rather, they are mature. One mark of intellectual and emotional maturity is the recognition that the color of truth is always gray.

2. Rumors of Sunni-Shi’a war

There is a deeper rift in the Middle East than the conflict between Arabs and Jews and between Muslims and Christians: the animosity between Sunnis and Shi’as. Owing to these other two tensions, the historic conflict between the two Muslim communities has mostly been papered over, but it has not disappeared.

On the one hand, Shi’a Iran is the main supporter of the fundamentalist Sunni Hamas – but al Qaeda and its supporters in Pakistan and Afghanistan regularly bomb Shi’a villages and mosques, as they did in Iraq, while Shi’a groups reciprocate in kind.

One of the more glaring manifestations of Israel’s strategic short-sightedness is its continued occupation and settlement of Palestinian territories, a fact that makes it impossible for the majority Sunni Arab world to make peace with the Jewish state and normalize relations with it. Peace and normalcy themselves will be a benefit to Israel — far more beneficial than occupying this hill or that rocky slope in the West Bank – but there is another strategic advantage to settling the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which will lead to the settling of the differences between Israel and the Sunni Arab world: it will allow the creation of an effective coalition to balance Shi’a Iran and contain its hegemonic ambitions.

The Wikilealks cables show Arab leaders much more concerned about Iran than they admit in public, with Saudi leaders urging the United States to attack Iran militarily. These Arab leaders, to the extent that they even mention the Palestinians, pay but lip service to it – something not lost on Israeli right-wingers who see this as proof that there is no need to make concessions to the Palestinians.

This is a mistake. The Palestinian issue may not be important to Arab leaders, but for the Arab masses is has acquired a symbolic significance which leaders in the Arab world cannot ignore. Anwar Sadat and King Hussein, in signing peace treaties with Israel before the Palestinian issue was settled, were the exception, but the peaceful relationship between Israel and Egypt and Israel and Jordan is often described as “cold peace” because the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict make it difficult for the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes fully to embrace the relationship.

The Sunni-Shi’a conflict, however, may come to the fore more forcefully than hitherto has been the case because of events in Bahrain. Of the all the Arab countries in which we have witnessed popular unrest, Bahrain is the only one where this unrest has be clearly sectarian in nature. Bahrain, like its other small oil sheikdom neighbors, is a semi-feudal society ruled by an extended family. There are about 1.2 million people living in the sheikdom, of which about 250,000 are foreigners, brought in to do work, from gardening to banking. About 57 percent of the population is Shi’a, and about 24 percent is Sunni.

This numerical balance proved tempting for the Iranian government across the Gulf, and it publicly supported the overthrow of the ruling family by the Shi’a majority.

The ruling family has proved resolute – and ruthless – in suppressing the demonstrations, imposing an emergency rule on the tiny kingdom. As importantly, Saudi Arabia put together a small contingent made up of soldiers and policemen from Sunni Arab countries, and this Saudi-led force was sent to Bahrain earlier this week to prop up Bahrain’s Sunni monarchy against the widening demonstrations by the Shiite-led opposition.

Earlier today, a senior Iranian cleric urged Bahrain’s majority Shiites to keep up their protests — until death or victory — against the Sunni monarchy. Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati called on “brothers and sisters” in Bahrain to “resist against the enemy until you die or win.”

The cleric spoke to worshippers in Tehran during Friday prayers. He asked all Muslims to support the opposition protesters in Bahrain, which is under emergency rule.

After prayers, thousands of Iranians rallied and chanted against the rulers of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

We should pay more attention to the growing tensions between Iran and the majority Sunni Arab world. Iran has proved adept at exploiting the presence of Shi’a minorities in Arab countries to destabilize these countries and increase its own influence. In the case of Lebanon and Iraq, where the Shi’a minority is the largest single group, Iran is on the verge of turning one country (Lebanon) into an Iranian outpost, while turning the other – Iraq – into a country much more hospitable to Iranian interests and preferences. Bahrain may be next.

In other countries – Saudi Arabia is good example – Iran may use the Shi’a minority to agitate against the regime and increase domestic tensions.

Stay tuned.

Ben Frankel is editor of the Homeland Security NewsWire