Chess champion to miss Saudi Arabia tournament over women's rights
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
[1] https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/fide-does-it-again-...
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.
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.)
http://lostislamichistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Fea...
Saudi is also influenced by the Salafi movement, but it is nestled in the Hanbali framework, which tends to put importance on imams (but not like Shias). The ulema (made up of "important" dudes dressed in robes) in Saudi Arabia has enjoyed a lot of importance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Senior_Scholars_(Sa...
I am a /little/ surprised that Saudi would go so openly against the ulema. Things might be changing there, with MbS at the helm.
This sounds similar though a lot more aggressively expansionist.
But historically as an outside it seems that Islamic sects are fairly analogous to Christian ones. There was an early split between Rome (Catholicism) and Constantinople (Eastern Orthodoxy), later various reformers led to Protestant sects, some of which eventually joined in alliances like the Evangelical Church in Germany (which includes Lutherans and Calvinists but has established a shared consensus).
At a glance, Christianity is defined by a split between Catholicism and Protestantism, with Protestantism being a fairly diverse collection of various groups ranging from Lutherans to Baptists.
Much of Christianity's present form is owed to the Peace of Westphalia, which in a nutshell led to the widely accepted ideology that it's okay for other countries not to share your religious beliefs (or even allow a diversity of beliefs in their own territories).
For what it's worth, early Islam is basically game of thrones. Worth checking out what happened in the decades following the death of Muhammad SAW.
Do people who grew up in former Ottoman territory have the same conception? Within that empire the idea of nation was quite different.
And though I consider the KSA tyrannical I don’t think they, any more than anyone else, should be condemned on incorrect grounds.
Further, these kinds of rulings don't apply to non-Muslims, so nothing is violated by inviting people from around the world (non-Muslims) to play chess in Saudi Arabia (as long as they don't visit the Hejaz).
Another thing to note is that Saudis play video games and watch foreign (read: American) movies. It would be pretty outlandish if that was tolerated but chess was banned. So I highly, highly doubt that chess is banned.
Straying off topic a bit: the dynamic with Israel is interesting. The Saudi government is pretty much aligned with Israel (anti-Iran, close American ally, anti-Islamist uprisings, wish to maintain the status quo), but they have to keep up a facade of zero diplomatic contact because being anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine is part of the Arab-Muslim identity at this point. You can bet Israel and Saudi Arabia have contact, it's just not out in the open.
Finally, something interesting to note is that Israeli-Arabs can visit Saudi Arabia and often do (for the Hajj). They just have to do get a Cypress or Jordanian visa and cross through Jordan.
Or is a simple history of homosexuality enough to fear imprisonment?
The fact that they are hypocritical when applying rules to themselves is not really a defense now is it?
>International events should not happen there.
Why? What is your rationale?
Until the very last minute, Saudi Arabia refused to issue visas to any players from Israel, Iran, or Qatar. At the last minute, they allowed players from Iran and Qatar in.
They continued to refuse to allow any players from Israel in.
"Be more tolerant! BTW, F* your god ! "
Just maybe it would get more media attention if she was physically there and refused to play in abaya or the "high-necked white blouses" nonsense.
Also, where is the solidarity form champions like Magnus Carlsen?
Really!!
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.827401 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.822554 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/israel-bds-la...
Luckily this nonsense hasn't spread to Europe and North America for the most part.
Not comparable, but we get up to shenanigans from time to time, too [1].
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/11/nasa-chinese...
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.
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.
Technically that isn't true. Modern Saudi Arabia is discriminatory when it comes to other religions.
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.
Earlier this year for instance: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-ar...
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.
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.
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.
Ad hominem / Appeal to motive?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_motive
In some cases, the leaders of BDS made anti-Semitic comments before joining/founding BDS. When a bunch of white supremacists join together to create an organization that accuses Afican countries of human rights violations, we acknowledge that that it's about a bit more than human rights.
For example, Omar Barghouti,the BDS founder believes that Jews don't have a right to self-determination, opposes the two-state solution (instead, he supports a single Palestinian state), and has no plan or suggestion for where Israelis should relocate. The UN recognizes that all people have a right to self determination.
My own experience is with the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) who threw rocks at the heads of Israeli students on my college campus and then published anti-Semitic fliers "to measure student viewpoints." SJP and BDS are closely associated.
I agree that people can be motivated by racism. I also think it is pretty clear that unfortunately Israel is pretty backwards with regards to human rights like a lot of the other Middle East countries.
You do not have to read BDS material to see that, just check Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch or any number of other international human rights organizations. Although I am sure you can play, if you wanted to, ad hominem bingo with those groups as well.
Here is a testimony of a man who wrote "Jewish" under the religion item of the visa application and received his visa and visited
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/my-saudi-sojourn...
Please do not downvote me. I am the only one who provided a source for my claim of who is and is not denied visas.
> 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"
> 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...)
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...
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.
As the saying goes, Israel wants to have its cake and eat it too.
So far I think Egypt is the only neighbouring country that isn't formally at war with them anymore.
Given those circumstances I kind of understand why they wont give away anything gor now.
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.
Isn't that what Trump's "Muslim ban" is?
Free speech but when free speech doesn't work ban the other speakers and live in a bubble. Awesome.
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.
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?
Previous administrations may have extended that trust, but that doesn't prove they were correct to do so.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/04/politics/supreme-court-travel-...
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.
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.
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.
[1] read the article you linked to!!
[2] https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120417zr1_j4... and https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/120417zr_4gd...
[3] http://www.politico.com/f/?id=0000015f-2bab-d519-a57f-7fabf1...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/22/us/travel-ban-court.html
I stand by this statement, as 'Muslim ban' is semantically false; Muslims are not banned from the US. If you can disprove this let me know.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/donald-trump-calls-for-total-an...
1) All countries are at different places in the march towards human rights. But participating in a women's sporting event in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia is a chance to help further women's rights in those countries as more women might want to play, become very very good, and have a high profile from which to challenge the regime. Refusing because you have to wear hijab or abaya is not worth giving up that chance to help women in such countries.
2) Saudi seems to be sponsoring much more prize money and accommodations. One ranked player complained that many participants had to fund their own travel in the past, that European countries aren't willing to sponsor the tournament, and only the top 4 players received any kind of compensation at all in the past. In Saudi it is supposed to be a better prize and travel is comped. One player said that such pitiful prize compensation as in the past is no less oppressive than having to wear a hijab.
3) Only one player mentioned this but I think it was worth mentioning. She said that human and women's rights are bad in Saudi but human and women's are ignored in other countries (for example, China multiple times in the past 20 years, Russia right after its annexation of Ukraine) the championship is in, and the 'principled' chess players never speak up then.
I think the last point is most revealing. Many of the players who boycott are concerned with regulations that affect them personally (I have to wear this. I won't be allowed to do this), and very few of them will ever care about the human rights violations or even women's rights violations that don't affect them. And of course we are not immune to this way of thinking either. It is easy for us to empathize when we have to go through what others go through. In China though (for example), when we are not having our family size culled and we are not being ethnically replaced with Han Chinese in our homelands, and we are not being suspiciously disappeared by the government like Ughyur Muslims, then we don't empathize enough to boycott a chess championship. We are not as up in arms about human rights and all this when it affects people who are not us. How many of us actually take our respective governments to task for their own rights violations (if you're American, a few years back, they bombed out an active, operating Red Cross Hospital, just as an example)?
It’s a tightrope for sure. On one hand, you can’t completely alienate people, because then they will not engage with the rest of the world and see how life can be better. On the other hand, being too accommodating reinforces the existing power structures against domestic pressure. It signals that you can participate fully in the western international order without adopting its values.
Something like refusing to hold international events in a place is a great pressure point. It’s not something like economic sanctions, which will cripple countries and make the people hate the west. At the same time, it’s an embarrassment and a source of shame to the ruling elite.
Here we have a woman that is expected to go to a country where she has to be escorted around by males, and is told how to dress. So this is directly affecting her, and her dignity. Maybe some will take the higher cash payments and not care if they have to become a second tier human for a bit, which is also fine. But this woman doesn't want to regardless of what the Saudis are paying.
I don't think she is trying to be a human rights champion, she is standing up for her dignity. I am glad the Saudis are making some progress on women's rights, but I also salute this woman for not wanting to take part while there is still blatant discrimination towards women/
It's also interesting that you become a second-tier human in Saudi because of segregation but being paid pennies so little that you can't even pay for the travel expenses to the World Women's Chess Championship doesn't make a you a second-tier human. The fact that no other country even wants to host this championship this year doesn't make the women second-tier humans.
1.) It's a huge reach to say that having foreign women participate in this tournament will have any impact whatsoever on Saudi Arabian women. Saudi Arabians have TV, they have twitter, they know what chess is. Frankly, the only people who actually care enough to watch a chess tournament are people who already understand chess. Also, "challenge the regime"? Come on, refusing to comply as a women in KSA just gets you arrested or killed.
2.)> "One player said that such pitiful prize compensation as in the past is no less oppressive than having to wear a hijab.". That's a terrible analogy. It's not just wearing a hijab that's the cost. It's actually putting yourself at the mercy of a nation which has encoded sexism into it's national laws and identity. It's knowing that if something bad happens, your word is worth less than a man's in a court of law. It's knowing that your movements are at someone elses mercy because of your chromosomes. It's about knowing that by going there and spending money, you are legitimizing the archaic, systematic oppression that treats half of all people as less human than others.
3. It would be great if more people spoke up for human rights that don't affect them, but you have to pick your battles sometimes. Women have the right to advocate for themselves before everyone else. It's hypocritical to fault a woman for calling out sexism but not other human rights abuses, if you wont fault men who call out neither. And sexism in China is hardly comparable to that of the KSA.
In short, I think she made the right call. As a woman, I would never willingly put myself at the mercy of a state that doesn't even pretend that I'm a full human being of equal worth to men. KSA is way out of the norm on this matter and need to change their laws if they expect western women to travel there.
Also, it is not a huge reach to say that it will have any impact whatsoever. Knowing what chess is and actually seeing / meeting a female world chess champion are different and most people realize that.
Furthermore, yes, activists in nearly every oppressive regime are jailed or killed. Mandela was jailed. MLK Jr. was jailed. Manal al-Sharif, a women's rights activist in Saudi Arabia, was jailed. All of them were jailed under existant laws in the country at the time of arrest. But the fact that countries jail outspoken activists isn't reason enough to boycott an international event, else you'd be able to go nowhere.
As someone else mentioned, there is a fine line between boycotting and attending international events in controversial settings. On the one hand, you have a chance to further international understanding, show citizens what other cultures and people are like, and influence the country which is hosting you. On the other hand, you may be legitimizing oppression. Jesse Owens ran in the Olympics hosted in Nazi Germany. If he had boycotted, perhaps some would have agreed and others disagreed. Similarly here, some women agree with the decision and some disagree. You and the chess champion in the headline, as women, would boycott. These women, as women, would not. Both have some valid reasons.
As long as it’s one country, one vote, you’re likely to get outcomes like this one, where a wealthy federation can buy off a large number of smaller federations. This is a perpetual problem in professional chess, hence the existence of proposals like this one: https://en.chessbase.com/post/one-vote-per-rated-game
Edit: Also worth noting, Saudi Arabia was the ONLY bidder for this year’s championships.
FIDE (the international chess governing body) seems to be about on par with FIFA when it comes to planning events (and possible graft).
Ilyumzhinov is too busy hanging out with extraterrestrials to take bribes