My Brain Is My Weapon

I’ve been watching a film from Blockbuster the whole night. It’s called “Walk on Water”. It’s about an Israeli assassin that befriends the children of a Nazi war criminal during his mission to kill their grandfather, a Nazi war criminal.

It’s not at all relevant to my story but it still reminds me. It reminds me of a time when I was speaking at a military conference in Israel. My boss was from Lebanon and he was on before me. The conference was unique to me in that it was the first time I has spoken in front of an audience that held guns. The only other gun-toting audience I had ever spoken in front of was other members of my extended family during our drunken pontifications around the campfire in Minnesota. But my family members are typically not menacing. There were at least 500 people in the audience at that conference in Israel and a lot of them were “packing” and many fit the description “menacing”.

On this trip, both my cell phone and computer had miraculously died 48 hours before my trip. El Al staff held me for questioning at Heathrow in England for four hours trying to reason why a computer scientist would be going to speak in Israel without any electronic equipment. They finally let me onto the plane.

Once arrived, I remember going through the Tel Aviv airport customs with my Lebanese boss. Because of his passport, they questioned him relentlessly. They finally let him through with the comment “you think like an Israeli” after he commented “my brain” after they asked him if he had any weapons.

The conference subjects were non-controversial and rather boring; information technology. But none-the-less, the audience was overwhelming to me. At such a safe conference, I remember being astounded that our demonstration PDA’s were stolen. This was at a time when PDA’s and their applications were still novel and also before they had those nifty, glued-on wires that would protect such portable devices. I was astounded at the fact that someone would actually steal anything in the company of hundreds of armed people.

The most memorable moment of the conference was during my speech of my boss, the guy from Lebanon. He spoke eloquently for a long time and then his screen saver kicked in on his PC. Unfortunately, his screen saver was an image of the cover of the book “The Prophet” (image above). The image itself carries a message.

The whole conference room with 500 people went silent as he scrambled to move his mouse...