The Mo Farah Incident at Munich airport

Hi guys, I always like to tackle a controversial topic and I am going to take on the Mo Farah incident at Munich airport which has been circulating a lot on social media. Many people have just simply assumed that Farah was a victim of racism at the hands of the Germans, whilst others have taken the side of the German authorities and claimed that Farah was deliberately being difficult and uncooperative with the authorities at the airport, playing the race card out of turn. As someone who has traveled in and out of Germany quite a lot for work, I'd like to offer a slightly different perspective on the issue to introduce an element of common sense to the debate, an alternative explanation to the two which have already been circulating on social media. But first, I would invite you to watch the video below to see what has happened.

Well, what actually happened at Munich airport? So firstly, let's look at the version of events as supplied by the German authorities: "It seemed that Sir Mo Farah did not agree with this passenger security check performed on him and blamed this check on a racist measure. Obviously he was very upset. As Sir Mo Farah didn't want to leave the security check point, security staff asked the Federal Police officer seen in the video for support. In cooperation with the security staff's supervisor, the officer tried to explain this routine measure to Sir Mo Farah and to calm him down. Unfortunately that didn't work. Then the officer asked him to leave the security check point because he was blocking the area. Sir Mo Farah got more and more upset. He continued arguing and blaming security staff and the Federal Police Officer being racists Farah began to film in the security check area, which is not allowed. The officer asked him to stop immediately recording. As Sir Mo Farah ignored this police order the officer asked him to leave the security control area and proceed to his departure gate. Mr Farah persistently ignored this second police order so that the officer slightly touched him and tried to direct him away from the security check area to the shopping and gate section what you can see in the video."

Farah's version of the event can be summarized by his post on social media: "The guy is touching me up like crazy. Pure harassment. Pure, pure, harassment, Sad to see racial harassment in this day and age. 2018...!!!!" I think the missing piece of the puzzle is what happened prior to when Farah starting filming - what was this 'passenger security check' performed on him and why did it upset Farah so much? Here's the thing about airports - it is fairly straight forward and given the sheer number of people passing through the airports, trying to catch flights, the staff only stop a certain number of people for enhanced security screening. Now it seems that Farah felt he was singled out because he is black and for the way he was dressed but there could be a whole range of other reasons as to why you could be singled out. Let me give you a simple example: I was once flying through Berlin Tegel airport when I set off the metal detector - it turns out it was a belt buckle, I had neglected to take that off but I realized okay, I had to take off the belt and co-operate with the staff who wanted to make sure they isolated precisely what had set off the metal detector. I co-operated fully with the staff and I realized that it wasn't anything personal they had against me, it was solely because I had set off the metal detector. The whole process added a few minutes to the time spent passing through security, but it ultimately wasn't a big deal. At no point did I feel that I singled out because I am Asian - that was just the kind of thing we expect at most airports.

Without actually analyzing the CCTV of what happened to Farah, I don't want to jump to any conclusions about who was at fault. Either the staff were genuinely racist and were rude to Farah for no good reason, or Farah had behaved in an unreasonable manner - we don't know. But this much I can say, a police spokesperson said security checks at Munich airport are carried out by a private company on behalf of the State of Bavaria. At this point, I'd like to share another story. There was also another time many years ago when I was detained for a few minutes when flying to Frankfurt - that was when I still had a Singaporean passport and the airport staff detained me for about ten minutes for no good reason. Fortunately, I speak German so I was able to speak to the staff and found out that they were not sure if Singaporeans were allowed to enter Germany without a visa. I had insisted that I didn't need a visa and they weren't going to take my word for it, the officer in charge decided to call someone a lot more senior but they couldn't get hold of this more senior officer for a while. However, the moment they got confirmation, they let me through immigration and apologized for having caused me a delay. Here's the thing about some German people: they would take a look at me and assume that I'm Chinese, I can't possibly understand German and it really boiled down to the staff not having seen a Singaporean passport before and not having any clue where the hell this country Singapore was. Unfortunately, I have encountered similar problems traveling around with my Singaporean passport in the past - you'd like to think that an immigration officer at an airport would be a bit more enlightened when it came to the countries of the world, well you'll be surprised.

The security staff who do the kind of work which involves patrolling airports are not well paid. Take the UK for example: according to Totaljobs.com the starting salary for security jobs at airports is £16,622 - that's not very high at all, but then again, that's compensation for standing around doing surprisingly little. At those wages, you're not going to attract highly educated, intelligent people to those kinds of jobs! Look, I've traveled a lot in the last six months and surprisingly little happens at airports - most people are just sitting around waiting for their flights, killing time in the duty free shops and restaurants and looking for somewhere to charge their phones. Sure, once in a while, you may get a major incident at an airport like the bombing at Brussels Airport in 2016 but even when that happens, your average security guard can do very little apart from call the police to alert them, so the specialist trained personnel can actually step in and deal with the situation. Most security guards at airports are reduced to making sure nobody is shoplifting from the duty-free shops or responding to questions like, "where is the nearest toilet please?" In short, they're mostly bored (rather than racist) and when you get a tall guy like Mo Farah making a fuss at the security check point, this is when the security staff would spring into action, thinking, "finally something exciting is happening, this is exactly what I have trained for." Now I postulate that the security guard may have been over-zealous in this regard, but what was his motivation in doing so? Was he just keen to do his job after having been standing around all day doing practically nothing? Or was he a racist who singled Mo Farah out because of the colour of his skin? My instinct would point to the former rather than the latter. 

Was Farah a threat to security? No, of course not. Was the security guard over-zealous in trying to remove him? Yes, clearly. Did Farah over-react by taking out his phone and filming? Possibly, but a lot of that really depends on what prompted Farah to take his phone out and start filming in the first place, so it is impossible to determine if it was an overreaction if we don't know what he was reacting to. But was it racism? I don't think so and all I am saying this having spent a lot of time in Germany - I remember the one time I thought I was being racially discriminated against in Berlin and after having spoken to a local German person, I found out that it was not the case at all. I was at a fast food restaurant Nordsee and I wanted to order a salad. Here's how it works: there are a range of fish dishes you can choose from and you had to line up at the cashier, tell the cashier what you want and then the cashier would go fetch the food for you from the counter and bring it back to you, then you pay. However, instead of standing in line at the cashier, I stood in front of the salads because I wasn't quite sure how I would describe precisely which salad I wanted (there were a few kinds) and I thought it would be easier just to point to the one I wanted rather than turn this into yet another test for my German. So I stood there for a while but I was ignored by the cashier and I blew up - giving her a bilingual rant in English and German about her being racist and refusing to serve me because I'm Asia, before storming out of the Nordsee. You can see how I felt I was being singled out as she served a white customer who had arrived after me, I got so angry with that woman.

My German friend then explained to me that it was not racism at all, but an East German mindset to blindly follow the rules and punish those who dare to break the rules. In the mind of the cashier, she had to serve the customers in a certain way and she was unable to step out of her routine - this is the kind of mindset that has been deeply drilled into the mindset of those who were brought up in communist East Germany and they have a very different relationship with rules compared to those who were brought up in the democratic West Germany. I argued that I was a tourist and there were no clear instructions on how food was to be ordered in a Nordsee fast food restaurant, how was I supposed to know where to line up? Why couldn't the staff have been more helpful?  "In communist East Germany, if you don't know the rules, then it is entirely your fault, never the fault of the system." I was assured that if I was a blond and blue eyed Northern European and I tried to order a salad from the wrong place in that same Nordsee, I would have been ignored as well - it had nothing to do with my skin colour but there was clearly something else quite quintessentially East German at play there. Yes it was a misunderstanding that resulted because of a clash of cultures, I thought it was racism but in hindsight, it was something else altogether. This begs the question: are black and Asian people like Mo Farah and myself just too keen to play the race card, when there could be a multitude of other reasons why we have been singled out?

In hindsight, perhaps my expectations were too high - after all, Nordsee is like McDonald's, KFC or Burger King in Germany. It is merely a fast food chain serving mostly seafood dishes and it is the kind of place you would grab a quick meal for a very reasonable price, but don't expect the kind of service you would of a fine restaurant. The elderly cashier who ignored me must have been in her mid 60s at least, sure the Berlin wall came down in 1989 but it still lives on in the mindset of people like her who did grow up in communist East Germany. Fast food restaurants aren't exactly hiring top graduates to work in their restaurants doing jobs like that - I am sure they do hire some scholars who may end up in their head office working on marketing strategies or managing their finances, but perhaps we just have to accept that certain kinds of people would end up working in lowly-paid, unskilled jobs in like in fast food restaurants or security jobs in airport and if they were any more intelligent or capable, well, then they wouldn't be doing such jobs in the first place. When dealing with people so low down in the food chain, perhaps it is unreasonable of us to expect such high standards of them and then kick up a huge fuss when they mess up out of no more than sheer (for want of a better word) stupidity?

This reminds me of the reviews I have read for a cheap and cheerful one-star hotel in Copenhagen. I visited Copenhagen in 2015 and Denmark is frightfully expensive - Copenhagen is up there with Oslo and Reykjavik as one of the most expensive cities in Europe to visit. So as I was looking for a reasonably priced place to stay, I came across this one-star hotel in central Copenhagen and I went to read the review on Tripadvisor to see what other travelers thought of the place. The place had shockingly bad reviews about how small the rooms are, how old the furniture was, how noisy the place was and how inconsiderate the other travelers were. The owner of the hotel replied to the nasty comments in the same way, "in case you didn't realize, we're a one-star budget hotel, not a five-star hotels. You can't expect to pay one-star prices and demand five-star quality. You get what you pay for: we offer a cheap alternative in an otherwise expensive city where even two-star hotels charge at least double the prices we're charging. Next time you come to Copenhagen, I suggest the Hotel d'Angleterre, they are Copenhagen's best hotel but don't expect them to charge what we charge." So whilst I can avoid one-star hotels and fast food restaurants like Nordsee if I choose to be a snob and pay for five-star luxury, but we certainly don't have a choice when it comes to airports. Even if you pay $10,000 for a first class ticket, you still have to pass through security like everyone else who are flying on a budget airline on a $100 ticket.

One thing I can say is that black and Asian people have absolutely nothing to worry about when traveling through German airports. That's not to say that Germany is a crime-free country: there are indeed places where even your local white Germans would stay the hell away from because those are not particularly safe neighbourhoods. But there are so many reasons why there may be a threat to your personal safety and I find it hard to understand why so many people are obsessed with racism when there are many other threats they really ought to be aware of! Otherwise, if you do get singled out for additional screening in any airport, I find that it is best to be cooperative with the authorities and get it over and done with as soon as possible. At least in somewhere like Germany, they are probably just over-zealous in doing their jobs, whereas in some corrupt third world country, security staff would deliberately detain you when you have a flight to catch and the only way you would make your flight is to pay a hefty bribe to be 'released' from detention. That kind of shit would never happen in a country like Germany and thank goodness for that. Sure I have encountered some ignorance in Germany whilst working there, but outright racism? No, never. Germans are far better than that as a nation.

So that's it from me on this topic. It is kinda short but I thought I'd rush it out whilst the topic is current and in the news. Let's see if there are any developments to this story, or if it would be forgotten within days. We still don't really know what exactly happened at Munich airport, but I find it very worrying that so many people have assumed that Farah is completely innocent and the Germans were totally racist. I would not jump to that conclusion based on the limited amount of evidence presented and it is dangerous to do so. What do you think? Have you had similar experiences traveling through Germany? Leave a comment below please and let's talk about it. Many thanks for reading, vielen dank!