The rough police treatment meted out to a UAE citizen outside an Ohio hotel has very rightly led to the likelihood of charges being brought against the people who alerted the authorities to the presence of someone they said was a terrorist. Ahmed Al-Menhali, a businessman, was wearing traditional robes in a hotel in Avon, Ohio. The female desk clerk reported that Menhali was carrying several phones and had pledged allegiance to Daesh (the self-proclaimed IS). Police arrived in force and manhandled the astonished businessman to the ground. The incident was recorded on the chest camera of one of the officers. After being cuffed, Menhali was pushed against the bonnet of a prowl car, frisked in a personal manner, ordered to remove his shoes and had his wallet and his nearby hire car searched. The mayor of Avon, Bryan Jensen has issued an apology to the luckless UAE national and consulted with the head of the local branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). It seems likely that the clerk and the relatives she called in a panic could face charges of wasting police time and making false accusations. It appears that the police will probably not be sanctioned because they thought they were facing a terrorist threat and went in hard. But there are those that would argue that, regardless of the seriousness of their suspicions, they could have behaved in a more polite and less aggressive manner. But US cops are already notorious for their almost paramilitary approach to policing. However, the real fault here is the general attitude of the American public, who continue to be spooked by the Islamophobic cant of presumptive Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his supporters. The horror of 9/11 led the US into a meltdown of their common sense. This was underpinned by the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The United States, the most powerful and technologically advanced nation on earth went into psychological lockdown. It shut out the light of reason. It replaced careful thought with raw anxiety. The terrified hotel desk clerk and her frightened relatives who called the cops epitomize the dark place of unreason in which America finds itself. And what compounds this, just as much as Trump's hateful racist bluster, is the extensive ignorance of so many Americans about the rest of the world. Isolationism, shutting out other countries, is never far from the surface and is easy in a nation that is so rich and varied that it is almost a world unto itself. It would be good to think that the Menhali scandal might be a wake-up call to turn back the ignorant prejudices that discolor the attitudes of US Jo Public. But it seems most unlikely. Instead it must be the outside world that adjusts to America's failings. The UAE has warned its nationals not to wear traditional dress abroad. Many Middle Eastern visitors are wary of speaking Arabic in public, lest, like that Iraqi student on an airliner, they are arrested. The heart-breaking truth is that in the US, every Arab is regarded as a terrorist. This is a humiliating negation of all the honorable values that once distinguished the Land of the Free. And Trump with his despicable hate-speak is busy boosting this shameful tragedy.
