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US Stops British Muslim Family From Boarding Flight To Visit Disneyland (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: U.S. authorities blocked a British Muslim family from boarding a plane at London's Gatwick airport. They were flying to Los Angeles on a trip to visit Disneyworld. "U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials provided no explanation for why the country refused to allow the family of 11 to board the plane, even though they had been granted travel authorization online ahead of their planned 15 December flight." This comes at a time when prominent groups and individuals within the U.S. are arguing in favor of blocking entrance for all Muslims. The refusal, and the U.S.'s unwillingness to explain, is raising concern within the UK government. The family is out $13,340 for their plane tickets.
The implication of the article is that somehow US authorities are discriminating against this family because of their faith. Obviously, that's false, since there are large numbers of Muslims traveling to the US every day.
The actual reason may be anything from insufficient funds to cover a family of 11 to documented terrorist connections. Would it be better for US authorities to provide reasons and let people know earlier? Of course. Is there any kind of obligation to do so? No.
Note that the UK bans people from entry for no other reason than that they voice unpopular political views, so the UK government is hardly in a position to criticize other nations over arbitrary exclusions.
I don't care about muslim psy-ops fairy tales. But a few days ago the korean teenage girl pop band "Oh My Girl" was detained for 12 hours and then sent home from LAX, because US border control searched their luggage and decided they must be underage sex workers, based on the wardrobe they brought for a photo-op and a concert.
The incident was pretty big news in Asia, BBC News covered the story twice and even the infamously anti-korean japanese otaku sided with band members. (Who doesn't like kawaii kittens?) US diplomacy salvaged the incident by stating the girls were turned back for not having an appropriate type of employment-allowed visa, even though South Korea is on the visa lift list.
For details and photos, see:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/35071156/k-pop-group-oh-my-girl-detained-at-la-airport-on-suspicion-of-being-sex-workers
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/35101815/k-pop-group-oh-my-girl-had-wrong-visa-says-us-customs-and-border-protection
Of course, the story was submitted to Slashdot but didn't make it for lack of M-word in the title...
You don't need a visa but you *DO* need to be pre-approved for travel to the US by the ESTA (Electronic System for Travel Authorization) which they were. So they had applied for travel authorization in advance, and been granted authorization.
It's not just Muslims - there was a man deported on arrival a couple of years ago because he had used a particular turn of phrase in British English (which is entirely non-threatening in British English, but interpreted as a threat by the US immigration service) on a twitter message. This showed before the Snowden stuff came out plenty of evidence that the US not only trawls social networks, but has mechanisms to match a Twitter pseudonym to an actual live person. Snowden merely confirmed what we could infer already from incidents like this.
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And maybe... just maybe... if the US loses 200 billion dollars a year in tourism income, our politicians will pull their heads out of their asses and start making some sane national security policies (but I wouldn't hold my breath).
As an American, I call tell you that that is not very likely. Few Americans directly benefit from foreign tourism. Americans in general are somewhat xenophobic and its not unusual for them to think that everybody on earth except maybe people in Canada lives in absolute third world squalor in their pitiful, sad country. Americans don't really care at all - not at all - if foreigners face severe restrictions on coming here. And doing "tit for tat" isn't going to change things because the majority of Americans have never been outside of North America. If you just look at the group of Americans who've been outside of North America and remove the ones who've only been to the UK or France and never anywhere else, then you're looking at a pretty small subset of people. Most Americans could not possibly care at all if they aren't allowed to visit foreign countries or if it becomes more difficult to do so because they weren't going to do that anyway.
There may or may not be a good reason why this family ran into problems, but we're unlikely to ever know what the real reason was. My guess is the UK family is Pakistani, which going forward is going to become more and more of a red flag to American DHS people, and they may be connected to a mosque that is under US scrutiny. Or it may just be a complete bunch of crap but either way we'll never know. Some of this may also be a complete overreaction to the recent San Bernardino shootings where the wife was Pakistani and DHS completely fell down on the job by failing to look into the fact that her husband had never actually met her in person before their marriage when he filed for the fiancee visa to bring her over here. All I can say is that over a decade ago I filed for a fiancee visa (we never got married as we broke up before the very final steps of the process, but I digress) as did a friend of mine. We both had girlfriends in Eastern Europe. It was really easy to prove my girlfriend and I had met as I had photos of us together and phone records and email that I submitted with the application to prove we had met in person. My application got preliminary approval and basically all we had to do was go through the final steps, including her personal interview, and she was going to get the visa. Proving that she and I met was incredibly easy since we actually had done so. In fact, at that time there was some government website you could go to where you could look up fiancee visa applications that were denied and the most common reason for denial was lack of proof of a personal meeting. Meeting in person before you apply for a fiancee visa is an absolute legal requirement. So it may suck, but I suspect even if there is no terrorism link that the family is Pakistani and they're suffering for the sins of others from Pakistan.
I was in Britain last summer (Scotland, specifically) for the Fringe. No visa on our US passports, no problems at arrival airport, immigration security people firm (as is their job) but polite. It *can* be done nicely. Reading British coverage of this, I am embarrassed that, as an American, my personal reputation (and future welcome back) is sullied by poor handling of this situation. This should be the same as a police stop: There has to be a reason, and the person should be TOLD the reason, and it better be a good enough reason to justify screwing up someone's day, not to mention potentially losing out on the expense of the tickets. Considering most of these cases are going to be false positives, the impression it gives of the US as a randomly secret-police state is a stain on all of us.
Most of you idiots don't even know the first thing about Islam.
Do you have nothing against Islam?
Then you have nothing against stoning, amputations, flogging, female genital mutilation, suicide bombers, beheadings, "honour" killings, repression of free speech, abolition of Parliament and its replacement with Shariah, banning of music, banning of beer and wine, banning of pork, dressing women in burkhas, beating of wives, mutiple wives, killing of rape victims, persecution of Jews and Christians, child brides, repression of reason and questioning, islamic police states, burning of churches, killing anyone who leaves islam, killing anyone who questions the teachings of islam, total intolerance of other religions, inferior status of women, violent Jihad against non-muslims, arranged marriages, acid attacks, public hangings, mutilations, rewriting of history, denial of islamic atrocities...
Islam... in layman's terms
Here's how it works:
As long as the Muslim population remains under 2% in any given country, they will, for the most part, be regarded as a peace-loving minority, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:
United States -- 0.6% Muslim
Australia -- 1.5% Muslim
Canada -- 1.9% Muslim
China -- 1.8% Muslim
Italy -- 1.5% Muslim
Norway -- 1.8% Muslim
At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize to other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from prisons and street gangs. This is happening in:
Denmark -- 2% Muslim
Germany -- 3.7% Muslim
United Kingdom -- 2.7% Muslim
Spain -- 4% Muslim
Thailand -- 4.6% Muslim
From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves -- along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:
France -- 8% Muslim
Philippines -- 5% Muslim
Sweden -- 5% Muslim
Switzerland -- 4.3% Muslim
The Netherlands -- 5.5% Muslim
Trinidad & Tobago -- 5.8% Muslim
At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Shari'ah, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Shari'ah law over the entire world.
When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris, we are already seeing car-burnings. Any non-Muslim action offends Islam, and results in uprisings and threats, such as in Amsterdam , with opposition to Mohammed cartoons and films about Islam. Such tensions are seen daily, particularly in Muslim sections, in:
Guyana -- 10% Muslim
India -- 13.4% Muslim
Israel -- 16% Muslim
Kenya -- 10% Muslim
Russia -- 15% Muslim
After reaching 20%, nations can expect hair-trigger rioting, jihad militia formations, sporadic killings, and the burnings of Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, as in:
Ethiopia -- 32.8% Muslim
At 40%, nations experience widespread massacres, chronic terror attacks, and ongoing militia warfare, as in:
Bosnia -- 40% Muslim
Chad -- 53.1% Muslim
Lebanon -- 59.7% Muslim
From 60%, nations experience unfettered persecution of non-believers of all other religions (including non-conforming Muslims), sporadic ethnic cleansing (genocide), use of Shariah Law as a weapon, and jizya, the tax placed on infidels (yes, there really is such a thing) as in:
Albania -- 70% Muslim
Malaysia -- 60.4% Muslim
Qatar -- 77.5% Muslim
Sudan -- 70% Muslim
After 80%, expect daily intimidation and violent jihad, some state-run ethnic cleansing, and even some genocide, as these nations drive out the infidels, and move toward 100% Muslim, as has been experienced and in some ways is on-going in:
Bangladesh -- 83% Muslim
Egypt -- 90% Musl
I got that going into Dallas from the immigration officer. First off there were only 3 immigration desks for an entire B767 load of people. Fortunately, for a change, I was near the head of the queue. Now I normally went direct to Houston (where I worked) and Houston had never been a problem, they looked at my visa, asked a two questions or so about my work (I was on an L1 visa) and stamped my passport. But Dallas was another story. The immigration officer was surly and demanded to see my L1 petition. Fortunately I carried it in my hand luggage, and he looked at it and told me "This is a copy. Give me the original" (it wasn't a copy, it had the ink stamp clearly visible of the US Embassy). When I told him he said it was up to his judgement whether he could let me in and next time I may be deported.
Let's not get into the US Embassy in London. When I got the visa I had to go for an "interview". This consisted of sitting in a huge square room with a bunch of other people for about 4 hours. They give you a number, like a supermarket deli (probably the same system!) and you go up when your number is called. The numbers are called in seemingly random order, so you can't read the book you brought because you suspect if you miss your number they won't call it again and they will force you to schedule a new interview. They also leave these "newspapers" around as reading material called "Going USA", the first half of which is dedicated to people who immigrated to the US saying how awful your home country is and how awesome it is they immigrated into the US and are now running a gas station, and the last half is dedicated to how we're not going to give you a visa anyway. Anyway, so my number was called some 4 hours after I got it. The officer asked me one question "how long have you worked for $COMPANY". I told him. That's all he wanted to ask. We could have done it by phone, or he could have requested that from my employer, but instead I have to waste hours travelling to London and back to be asked a simple question with two word answer.
But that's not the best one. Eventually my visa was converted to an H1 to extend my stay a year. It was approved in the US, and all the paperwork was done in the US, but because I had a vacation home I had to get a new visa put in my passport. The US Embassy in London does this. There's another form (requesting all the information you've already supplied to the INS) that the embassy wants. My employer game me the form and I filled in the few things that my employer didn't (basically the same questions on the visa waiver, including the one about "moral turpitude"), enclosed it with my passport. They refused my (already approved!) visa application because they said this form was out of date. So I go to the US Embassy's website and download the new form.
It is Exactly. The. Same. To the letter, *apart* from the issue date at the bottom. Exactly the same. Of course now I have a non-refundable flight ticket that I can't use because another round-trip time of my passport to the embassy means I have to wait another 10 days.
I think part of the problem is these immigration jobs attract certain type of "little Hitler" personality. I'm not saying all the immigration officers are like this (the ones in Houston for example have never been anything except professional and polite). It's not just the US that does this either. My next door neighbour is Albanian and she's exactly the sort of person we want to come to our country - she's well educated, she's an engineer, fluently speaks three languages - but was treated to a degrading Kafkaesque experience by the UK immigration authorities when she was moving here.
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