OPINION

Get real about terror threats

I served in the UK armed forces for 20 years, three of them in Northern Ireland under a severe terrorist threat. Security was as tight as it could be. The UK experienced terrorism for 30 years and won because its security forces learned they had to be utterly professional.

These days I drive into Central Festival Hall Mall in Phuket. The security guys open your boot, see a large bag, and then shut it and let you drive in without checking it. What was the point of all that? It's a joke; a waste of time and effort.

Thailand thought recent events would never happen in tourist areas here, and they now have. It was all just waiting to happen.

It is time for Thailand to get real, and get professional about the threat it faces. The UK as a friend, I am sure, will be willing to help, as it always does. We, sadly, are the experts in such matters.

I just hope someone important here will make that phone call before something much worse happens.

They said the motive of those incidents were possibly political, not done by separatists in deep South or IS. Whatever they were, this provides a good reason to NCPO/PM to exploit them to contain and/or erase oppositions completely. Anyway, authorities need to step-up their security checks.

Checks and searches for vehicles, etc done in dangerous areas are nothing but kindergarten's play, not at all effective in preventing criminal acts.

I cannot hear the calls for unity any more. The way to deal with problems in society is to acknowledge the conflicts and then deal with them intelligently with dialogue and discussion which can at times be quite heated and involve street demonstrations. To suppress huge parts of society and put people who oppose an existing system in jail is no solution. It just exacerbates the conflicts and creates violence. Just look at the world's history.

There is no way the plan to re-route van services from the Victory Monument area is ever going to work.

It's entrenched, both for the van services and the public that use them.

The government should instead consider buying up the land behind the Victory Monument traffic circle, made up of very narrow laneway-streets and ramshackle shops. A gigantic van terminal could be created which would benefit everyone involved. Kindly do not feed me the old line that the land is privately owned and cannot be sold.

Not only does everything and everyone have its price, but previous governments have taken land away after paying market value, regardless of individual protests, if the land was needed for public projects such as road expansion, skytrain expansion and subway expansion, as is happening in Bangkok's Chinatown at this moment.

There is always a way to surmount the insurmountable, but it takes brainpower, thoughtful planning and cooperation, not half-baked, ill-thought-out solutions made by those who have never taken public transportation or vans in their lives, therefore not personally affected by their own stupidity, which of course, the decision makers consider clever.

In ancient Greece -- and this is a crucial aspect in the revival of the modern games by Baron de Coubertin in the late 19th century -- all armed conflicts ceased for the duration of the Olympic Games and bitter enemies competed in various sports and respected their rules.

Fast forward to Rio 2016. It seems that not everyone respects the sacred Olympic spirit of ceasing all hostilities. Egyptian judoka Islam El-Shahaby, for example, refused to shake the hands of his Israeli opponent in a fight that he incidentally lost, or indeed bow to his rival as customary in judo.

He justified his actions, which break not only the Olympic spirit but also that of judo, where the bow of respect is paramount, by declaring that his Muslim faith does not allow him to show any respect to the "enemy".

(Israel and Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1979 and only last week the Egyptian Foreign Minister paid an official visit to Israel.)

In a classic faux-pas, the Brazilian organisers assigned the Israeli and Lebanese delegations to the same bus that was supposed to carry them to the opening ceremony. But the Lebanese refused to allow the Israelis to board the bus in a blatant example of racist and political hostility.

The dressing-down the Lebanese delegation got for its clear breach of the rules did not change the facts of what occurred.

What will happen, one wonders, if the Israeli football team qualifies for the 2022 Football World Cup in Qatar?

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