[stcredzero]

So if any kind of religious or secular authority bans something, everyone from that country has to abide by that or be a "hypocrite?" Sorry, but that's illogical. Back in the day, holding inclusive events in the face of societal prejudice was an act of defiance. In the real world, progress is made by chipping away, not by grand gestures with emotional background music, followed by "The End." If you want to show that a group is being disadvantaged unfairly, then meritocratic competitions are what you want! Some women might find that participation in such action is worth wearing an abaya. Some might not. It's for them to choose, and calling one choice hypocritical strikes me as a bit reductive.

[pluma]

That's not what the argument is about at all.

Presumably the religious edict is upheld by the state, so the tournament is hypocritical because it's making an exemption for a small elite of international athletes to participate in a sport that is illegal for most of the population to enjoy.

[stcredzero]

That's not what the argument is about at all.

Is it? Isn't the performance of that small elite evidence that the state's edict is nonsense? By your logic, shouldn't Jesse Owens have boycotted the 1936 Olympics? Wasn't he a hypocrite for his performance? Even if he hadn't won, the fact of his superlative performance as part of a small meritocratic elite was a spotlight on the falsity of the Nazi state's ideology. In a scant few years, it would be against the wishes of the state for non "aryan" people to even live within the Nazi state, much less to run in track competitions. (1)

Sometimes I think people are more interested in passive-aggression in their protesting than in a coherent ideological message and position.

(1 - With the exception of some African American GI's, some of whom related being treated well by their captors. This was the edict of the higher-ups in the German military, in the interest of maintaining the Geneva conventions.)