Opinion: Tighter security or "rape on the run?"

The device shown here at Orlando International Airport in Florida, is the Secure 1000, a low-energy full body X-ray scan. The Netherlands and Nigeria agreed on Wednesday to employ similar scanners at their respective airports in an effort to up security measures. (Joe Skipper JLS/Reuters)

PARIS, France — Europeans, by and large, are no more eager than anyone else for in-flight distractions to include a terrorist bomb. Few, however, want to be unpaid porn stars.

If most Americans seem to accept the idea that security agents can leer at them beneath their clothes, reaction is decidedly different over here.

Netherlands and Nigeria adopted airport body scans after a young zealot flew from Lagos to Amsterdam before transiting to Detroit where he tried blow up the plane.

But the Dutch, like other Europeans, don’t like it.

“The image leaves me speechless,” said Margaret Binnendyk. “Some cretin ogling me? This is rape on the run, and I don’t even get a kiss. It will kill Playboy stock.

And she is only Dutch-born, now an American living in Seattle. A constant traveler, she wants tight security. But she knows that it need not be invasive or demeaning.

Response to peeping-tom machines varies widely. Some people who frequent nude beaches are amused. Others, whose beliefs require headscarves, veils or full burqas, are not.

“If I were a vivacious blonde with enormous breasts and could make some fat boy blush, then I would do it,” a vivacious blonde friend in London told me. “But as I’ve had major surgery, I’m a little more reticent.”

Yolanda Guerrero Domenech, an editor at the daily El Pais in Madrid, called the new X-ray “espantosa,” which goes way beyond the English equivalent, frightening.

Like many, she is appalled that so many people in a free society are ready to exchange human dignity for an illusion of safety.

“It is not about modesty, that they can see through my underwear,” she said. “It is a violation, a total invasion of intimacy. It’s bad enough they take my yoghurt cup.”

Guerrero says some U.S. airport practices have been challenged in European courts.

“I think in the end this will have a reverse effect,” she said. “People will finally decide that we are not in some Orwellian state, and they will not let this go.”

Security is vital, she concluded, but there are limits. “If you want to be totally safe, stay home, lock the door and hope the roof doesn’t collapse on your head.”

Even before September 2001, Europeans howled in protest at how Americans handle airport screening.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/091230/full-body-scanners-airport