Brian Rudman: Jumping the gun over tourist at prayer

Talk about a Monty Python sketch.

Jolly matelots on the the inter-island ferry hanging from the riggings for three hours spying on a "terrorist-looking" tourist of Middle Eastern persuasion, waiting to see whether he's about to blow them and 750 passengers to smithereens.

KiwiRail spokesman Kevin Ranshaw later said that to avoid mass panic, crew members observed the man without approaching him.

Yet the captain was so alarmed he called the police, who dispatched the armed special tactics group to nab the suspect and his accomplice when the ship berthed at Picton last Sunday.

It turned out the man was an Orthodox Jewish Israeli tourist going about his morning prayers. This involves criss-crossing leather straps up each arm and around the forehead and attaching little leather boxes containing morning prayers. Looking at photographs of such people at prayer suggests an extra from Xena Warrior Princess rather than a fanatic Muslim suicide-bomber, and as Race Relations Commissioner Joris de Bres said, "it's a reminder that we ought to pause and think before we jump to conclusions".

You wonder what would have triggered the captain into breaking out the ship's armaments - if such things exist - or ordering the passengers into the life rafts. The "bomber" and his mate lighting up a cigarette?

Mind you, the captain of last Sunday's Interislander ferry wasn't the first person to be spooked by the "tefillin" prayer boxes.

In January this year, a US Airways flight from New York to Louisville was diverted to Philadelphia after a 17-year-old Orthodox Jew strapped on his prayer boxes, much to the horror of a flight attendant who mistook the leather straps for cables and wires.

The teenager explained he was at prayer, but the pilot "had to follow his protocol". Which was, land as quickly as possible.

Mr de Bres called the weekend's incident an "unfortunate over-reaction" and says "just because someone is doing something religious in public ... doesn't mean that they are a terrorist," - and of course he's right. Still, a more worldly-wise tourist might have realised his quaint religious rites would not go unnoticed. He does, after all, come from the country that has helped trigger radical Islam's jihad against the West, and thus, raised security tensions worldwide.

Travellers can be insensitive. One of the scarier moments of my OE travels was crossing over from Afghanistan to discover myself in the Iranian city of Mashhad, one of the holiest places in Islam.

One memory is of a urbane scholar inviting me off the street to view the ancient and priceless illuminated manuscripts carefully tended in the local library. The other is of joining a couple of New York female backpackers for a coffee in a local restaurant.

I still recall the eerie silence that descended on the place as we entered. Coming from the land of the male-only public bar, I got the message. Women weren't welcome, especially women in Western clothes.

Let's go, I bravely whispered. My companions seemed set on upholding the American Bill of Rights. See you back at the hotel - if you make it, I told them and backed out. Sensibly, they joined me.

Mr de Bres talks of "an exaggerated fear of terrorism in New Zealand", and hopefully he is right. He was maybe recalling the incident three or four years ago, when a group of Sikh priests were asked to surrender their kirpans - religious daggers - after a worried fellow passenger on an Auckland to Napier flight, spotted one sticking out of a priest's shirt.

On the other hand, who, in 1985, would have imagined Auckland Harbour being the scene of state-terrorism, by France against the peaceful protest vessel Rainbow Warrior.

Still, as cultural misunderstandings go, the weekend's high jinks are at the amusing end of the spectrum, alongside former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's faux pas a year ago, when he opened a campaign to invite Indian students to join Australian families for a barbecue. It was in response to a spate of attacks on Indian students that was earning bad press in India. The problem was, most Indians are vegetarian.

What is certain, it was not the first cultural misunderstanding in New Zealand and it won't be the last.

Indeed, as historian Anne Salmond writes in Two Worlds, First meetings between Maori and Europeans 1642-1772 New Zealand modern history began with bloody cultural misunderstandings. When Abel Tasman first encountered Maori in what he labelled Murderers Bay, she notes how the local Maori "tried both ritual challenges and shouted messages, while the Dutch responded with trumpet calls, cannon shot and words from a Tongan vocabulary ..."

In the end, "the strangers were sent away, repelled by a maritime ambush ..."

In 1769, Captain Cook's first encounter in Poverty Bay began with a warrior being shot through the heart, and Cook placing nails and beads on his corpse.

Exactly why, it's hard to say.