Opinion: Tighter security or “rape on the run?”

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.

Early on, Air France disciplined a captain who, frustrated by repeated passes through the metal detector, flung himself onto the X-ray conveyor belt.

Another Air France pilot at JFK joked that he had a bomb in his shoe. Charged with reporting a false incident, he could have gotten seven years in prison.

Recently, Chloe Doutre-Roussel, a Frenchwoman who tastes chocolate for a living, rankled at the way a security officer pawed over her stuff. She smiled sweetly and began stepping out of her skirt. He cleared her.

For Europeans, the American airport experience goes far beyond inconvenient or philosophically offensive.

During a “lockdown” at JFK, security officers refused to escort a Romanian man in obvious pain to the restroom only a few feet away beyond a glass wall.

One officer yelled at the man to sit down and keep quiet. I extracted a notebook and wrote down his name. Glowering, he called his boss. We discussed civil service duties and the First Amendment. I may now be on some list.

“I lived through Ceausescu,” the Romanian told me, as he squirmed in agony. “This is worse.”

The terminal was later evacuated. Hundreds spent hours outside in freezing snow, clueless. An FBI agent let me know, subtly but plainly, the whole thing was a frivolous overreaction to a small incident.

Also at Kennedy, I watched a burly female officer force a frail German octogenarian out of her wheelchair and walk several yards. “I’m in pain,” the old woman gasped. “Don’t you know pain?”

“Oh, I know pain,” the officer said, rolling her eyes, as other passengers laughed. When the woman collapsed into a chair, I approached to help. She snarled like a cornered animal. We all were the enemy.

And now there is more.

Lavinia Percy, an upper class, down-to-earth Briton, said she thought Americans had essentially lost their collective minds.

“This is a nightmare,” she said, with an F-word adverb. “It is very, very tiresome, and I don’t think many British tourists will be going to America.”

She is wary of giving such arbitrary authority to people in uniform. “You’ve got to remember there are a load of pervs out there. Give them power, and they’ll use it.”