Israel banning people who are actively involved with the BDS movement from flying into Tel Aviv does not strike me as especially comparable to the Saudis prohibiting Israeli grandmasters from participating in a chess tournament in Riyadh. But that's just my opinion!
Strongly disagree. Why does actively being involved in BDS matter? It's a political stance against Israel's violations of international law by creating settlements and trying to annex them into Israel (among other things). Banning people because they don't agree with your politics is exactly what Saudi is doing.
> It's a political stance against Israel's violations of international law by creating settlements and trying to annex them into Israel (among other things).
This is the BDS viewpoint. The Israeli viewpoint is that BDS's singular focus on Israel to the exclusion of other human rights violation is a form of anti-Semitism. Though I am weary of endless Israeli claims of anti-Semitism, looking at the founders of BDS, this viewpoint is not without a kernel of truth. Without endorsing either view, it's important to recognize that for the Israelis, this is "banning hate speech" not "banning certain political views." Many many countries (including the US and UK) ban foreigners with a record of hate speech from entering their country.
> Banning people because they don't agree with your politics is exactly what Saudi is doing.
No. Saudi Arabia bars all Jews and Atheists from entering the country, regardless of their political ideas. Disbelief in God is not a political viewpoint by any normal standard.
> The Israeli viewpoint is that BDS's singular focus on Israel to the exclusion of other human rights violation is a form of anti-Semitism.
This is called "whataboutism" btw and is a recognized logical fallacy. It can be used against any group who tried to raise awareness of a specific injustice.
Au contraire, whataboutism is not always a logical fallacy. It can be simultaneously true that a) Israel is a human rights violator and b) BDS focuses on Israel to the exclusion of other human rights violators because of the anti-Semitic beliefs of their members.
Edit: a different explanation - it's true that "what about other human rights violators" is a logical fallacy in the context of Israeli human rights violations. But, our topic is immigration bans, and Israeli belief in BDS anti-Semitism and the corresponding ban on individuals entering the country is not necessary fallacious just because this point is irrelevant to the topic of Israeli human rights violations.
> Saudi Arabia has denied a report that it would begin allowing Jews to work inside the Gulf kingdom.
> In an official statement, the Saudi Labor Ministry denied a report last week in the Saudi al-Watan newspaper to the effect that non-Israeli Jews would be able to receive guest worker visas for the first time, the UK Middle East Eye reported Friday.
First page of Google results for "Jews Saudi Arabia"
Because political activism takes a stance on a political issue. Simply being born in a country and playing chess does not.
Banning people because they don't agree with your politics is exactly what Saudi is doing.
No, it is what Israel is doing and Mozilla is doing as well. And Germany is doing with Nazi party, and so on. All are going to say it's because the given issue is that major for them. But what Saudi is doing is banning someone for being born in a country. Playing chess has nothing to do with agreeing with someone's politics.
So if playing chess has nothing to do with agreeing with someone's politics why is it okay to ban people for disagreeing with your state's politics?
It isn't. Israel is doing it. Saudi Arabia is retaliating. There isn't a BDS on Saudi Arabia though, so they ban players from Israel. Being born in a country is one thing, but all Israelis (all Jewish, 18+ year old Israelis) also participate in the IDF and along with that they are a bit more complicit in any human rights violations they may commit and in furthering the political agenda of Israeli annexation of Palestinian territory as a result.
Being born in a country and playing chess is not "disagreeing with your state's politics".
And even that description is purposely flippant, and doesn't capture the real main reason why eg Mozilla fired its CEO or Germany bans the Nazi party. Or why many countries ban seditious speech (China, Jordan, and so on).
The reason is that they consider such speech to be dangerous to the security of the state itself. In that, if it spreads, it will undermine the current stability of the state. Also there are considerations from human rights point of view - that people could be threatened and suffer. For example gay partnes might have their equal right to visit each other in the hospital infringed. Israelis would be attacked as they were in Hebron in 1929. Nazis could wreak havoc and go on murderous rampages again. And so on.
What happened to freedom of speech? Well, it's not absolute in many places.
And anyway, equating Saudi Arabia to Israel on freedom of speech is rather silly. Israel allows all religions to come and worship openly. Saudis suppress all non-Muslim religions, and outlaw many types of observance. Israel allows gays to openly hold parades, and much more. Saudi Arabia executes gays and atheists for exactly that. A bit beyond "banning" for "disagreeing with politics". So keep a sense of proportion when you equate things.
You can’t get a visa to KSA if you are Jewish, no matter where you are from. Used to be you couldn’t get one if you wrote “Atheist” either. Then again they don’t have tourist visas (though isn’t that what a visit to Mecca is?)
> Luckily this nonsense hasn't spread to Europe and North America for the most part.
Umm, you have it backwards: there are people still alive who were subject to such rules in the Europe and North America (famously up into the 1940s, but also through 1990s in Balkans at least) and there are large numbers of people trying to revive such rules, some of whom are in governments (e.g. Hungary, Poland, Austria, USA...)
Isn't Israel denying voting and movement rights to millions of people within its formal borders merely because of the religious/ethnic identity of those individuals?
I could have sworn that is what the BSD movement is all about...
The Middle east is full of countries that act backwards. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, to name just the worst...
People say Israel withholds Palestinian voting rights in the occupied territories, but that's simply not true since the Oslo Accords. Palestinians aren't Israeli citizens. They can vote in PA elections, and do, when they have elections. Except the PA rarely has elections but that has nothing to do with Israel or the occupation.
Israeli Arabs, like all Israeli citizens, can vote in Israeli elections, and do. Israel is the only place in the Middle East Arabs regularly vote.
The Palestinian Territories aren’t within Israel’s formal borders, and it has nothing to do with religion or ethnicity. There are 1.7mm Israeli Arabs (20% of population, 90% are Muslim) who vote and have representation in government.
Nobody said that. A good start would be to cease construction of new settlements on illegal land. I am sure many neighboring countries would see that as a move in the right direction.
> So far I think Egypt is the only neighbouring country that isn't formally at war with them anymore.
That is false. None of the Middle Eastern countries are "at war" with Israel. On the contrary, some countries like KSA has begun trying to normalize relations with Israel, which is something many of its citizens do not agree with.
Actually you are correct, Trump promised this in his campaign and has tried to enact it in a few different ways. I am unsure why you are being voted down.
Source for this please. This claim is repeated quite often, but the only 'source' I've been able to find is when Trump was being mobbed by yelling people(after a debate or a speech), some activist asked him about 'banning muslims', and Trump started talking about how we need to build a wall and secure our borders. Basically - Trump misheard or misunderstood the question, and people take that as him advocating for a general Muslim ban.
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," his campaign said in a statement.
Not exactly a campaign promise, but Trump did inquire about how he could legally ban Muslims. One of his travel bans was even thrown out because a judge interpreted this to be evidence that Trump really was trying to do a Muslim ban https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/01/29/tr...
People will dishonestly refer to it as a 'Muslim Ban' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, in the end it only diminishes the credibility of those who want to allow immigration from those countries.
Trump's most recent travel ban was not "upheld" by the Supreme Court--it was allowed to take effect while legal challenges are pending.[1] At the same time, the Supreme Court instructed the Courts of Appeals hearing the cases to "render [their] decision[s] with appropriate dispatch," presumably so that the Supreme Court can consider the case and issue a final ruling quickly (well, "quickly" in legal time).[2]
Also, it is inaccurate to claim there is "overwhelming evidence" that the ban is not a Muslim ban, and it is an unhelpful ad hominim attack to call anyone who thinks it's a Muslim ban dishonest. The US District Court in Hawaii held that "EO-3 plainly discriminates based on nationality in the manner that the Ninth Circuit has found antithetical to ... the founding principles of this Nation."[3] I.e., it's a Muslim ban. And the Ninth Circuit recently upheld this opinion.[4]
The Supreme Court might overturn the Ninth Circuit decision, but you might want to edit your comment so it's less wrong.
Your link is seriously confusing (the article itself is correct, but your reading of it is not), because there have been several iterations of the travel ban, and the first one that Trump had after promising a Muslim ban during the campaign, and which Rudy Giuliani referred to in an interview as a Muslim ban, was thrown out, but your article is about a later, modified travel ban (that underwent a more serious legal review). One reason people call it a Muslim ban is because some of the people involved in creating it have called it that, which is not dishonest.
If somebody says that a certain travel ban was thrown out for being a Muslim ban, and you respond that a different travel ban was upheld, then that's just going to mislead people.
You know why this claim is “repeated quite often”? Others have already given multiple citations. But it’s one thing to miss a news item or two, it’s quite another to essentially say, “I don’t pay attention to the news whatsoever, so imma gonna need a citation for that thing that was the headline in every major newspaper last year.” Hell, even I knew that Beyoncé was pregnant.
If your values and ideas aren't so convincing and inherently good and right that people voluntarily moving to your country don't want to adopt them and you need to resort to banning them rather than accepting them into your country and proving with your way of life how much better your values and ideas are, then how good are those values and ideas really?
Free speech but when free speech doesn't work ban the other speakers and live in a bubble. Awesome.
You really think that your beliefs are so obviously superior to every other belief system ever - even millennia-old self-reinforcing super-memetic religious ideologies - that everyone will just automatically start thinking like you if given the chance? Really?
This strikes me very much as a classical cognitive failure: An inability to understand that other people actually, truly think differently than you do. E.g. Other people actually believe that God is real. Actually, truly, like he's really there. And they'll act like it.
You're completely wrong on this entire thing. The ban is not about values, it is about not being able to acceptably vet who is entering the country when they originate from certain areas.
And to your point, even though it is an incorrect analysis of the situation - what makes you think that people just do what is inherently good and right? Prisons exist in every country for a reason.
> The ban is not about values, it is about not being able to acceptably vet who is entering the country when they originate from certain areas.
My spouse is an Iranian national and affected by the ban. I'm from Germany, where we live. Why can't the Trump administration vet her, given that previous administrations could and did?
They also said it would take 90 days to implement "extreme vetting". If it was just about trusting other governments, they wouldn't have promised that at all.
Why haven't they done it nearly a year later? Probably a good indicator not to blindly trust autocrats who run election campaigns on xenophobia.
What kind of information? How is this presumed information exchange supposed to work? Is the idea that if I travel to the United States, or apply for a visa, that the US will query my government / my government's secret agencies for information about me, and my government will comply? Because (hopefully) that isn't really how it works.
The question isn't about vetting one person - it is about laying out a general rule that we won't accept people from countries where terror cells are common and the rule of law and record keeping is weak.
As you write, not comparable, but in their defense, NASA's administrative side is pretty thoroughly hoarked. It shouldn't suprise anyone that they occasionally make idiotic decisions.