The camera-toting journalist from the elevator came over to us. It was clear from his demeanor that he wasn’t going to bring up becoming Facebook friends.
“Where are you from?” he asked, eyebrows furrowed.
“I’m from New Jersey,” I responded. Which, technically, is true.
“You know that that’s not what I mean,” he said, starting to reach for my press pass around my neck.
How to respond? “The Zionist Entity,” I wondered? Or perhaps “The Zionist Regime”? I stepped away from his hand. “The Jerusalem Post.”
“THE JERUSALEM POST?” he responded, incredulously. “Well, YOU have to leave.” He leaned forward, somewhat menacingly. “And you KNOW why.”
“Do I?” I asked.
He walked away and started whispering to another reporter. The second reporter then walked over to another man in the requisite gray suit jacket and no tie, who looked over.
Sometimes, people don’t have to wear a nametag or badge for you to know who they are. And there was no ambiguity whatsoever, without introduction, that the guy approaching us now was part of the Ahmadinejad security detail. And clearly, I – a 5’2 Jewish woman from New Jersey – was a security risk.
“You have to go,” he said, wearing what Dave would later call ‘thug face.’ “You have to go right now.”
“She said we could stay,” I said, pointing at the woman across the room who clearly no longer wanted anything to do with us.
“We have every right to stay,” Dave said. “This is the United Nations. This is America.”
But this isn’t really America, I thought as the thuggy guy, hands on his hips, breathed heavily in my face. This is not America. This is the basement of a multinational complex, where a staggeringly high level of deference is being paid to the whims and fancies of a man being protested by hundreds outside. This is a place where the regular rules don’t matter, and where regulations and standards are easily trumped by fear and cowardice. This is an underworld. The woman came over. “I’m sorry,” she said to me. “They know who you are, and you have to leave.”
That’s the problem, I thought as I was escorted out. We all know who we are. We just don’t agree on who has to leave.
via jpost.com
this is not the inclusive entity that the United Nations claims to be. Throw the whole building out of the United States
