Word: ben
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...Liquid explosives also attack airline security's weakest point - the Transportation Security Administration screeners. They are the burger-flippers of the entire security system, and the chances of even the best of them visually identifying a liquid explosive in an innocuous bottle are slim - that's why Israel's Ben Gurion airport has a laboratory in the basement to conduct instant tests of liquids found on suspect passengers. If the U.S. system lacks sufficient technology to detect liquid explosives, and if it relies on the TSA screeners to ID possible terrorists, it is, at best, a wire mesh fence...
Flying out of Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport recently, after covering the outbreak of violence between Israel and Hizballah, I got the usual treatment for a gentile foreigner: half an hour of questioning by a young security agent before I even got to the counter. He started with "when were you born?" and ended with "how did you get to the airport?" and covered a lot of ground in between. I was accustomed to the drill, having lived in Israel throughout the 1990s as TIME's Jerusalem bureau chief. This, chiefly, is how the Israelis keep aviation safe...
...Sometimes, questions don't suffice. In the mid 90s, my brother and his wife came to visit me in Israel, and something about these two blond Louisiana lawyers struck the security officials at Ben Gurion as suspicious. After the usual bout of questions, they were led away to a special room where every ounce of toothpaste, lotion, shampoo and Neosporin in their luggage was squeezed out of its packaging and examined. They missed their original flight and, once deemed harmless, were eventually put on a later one, but only after officials seized my brother's scuba diving gear...
Most times, when someone spouts off about how awful the Jews are, I blow it off as ignorance. If the guy just got to know us, he would totally dig us. We're funny and warm and smart and totally self-effacing. We send Ben Stiller to Iran for a few weeks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will be opening up Noah's bagel shops in all the strip malls in Tehran. The only problem is that with just 0.02% of the world's population, we can't do nearly as many personal appearances as we'd like. That's why we took...
...biggest disagreement was about chunks. Ben came up with the flavors and I did the manufacturing, and he wanted bigger chunks and I wanted smaller ones with greater distribution. He said people didn't care if you got a chunk in every bite as long as you knew that fairly soon you'd get a chunk...