Nasir El-Amin <nasir_ela...@protonmail.com> writes: > Israeli is a nationality not the faith of Judaism. I’m criticizing > citizens (which practice a variety of faiths) of a genocidal apartheid > state that’s killed tens of thousands of Muslims.
The same argument can be made about US treatment of Native Americans, and while the ongoing conflicts are not as severe as they are in Israel, they are still ongoing. As a US citizen I find those actions abhorrent, and I understand why individuals may not want to visit or support the US because of them, but I still think there is some limit to the personal responsibility that I have as a US citizen for the actions of my government, when I vote against those actions at every opportunity that I have. It is very difficult to just leave the country you were born in, of which you are a citizen, and where all of your friends and family reside. There is a limit to how much one can personally do to prevent one's government from taking actions one finds abhorrent. At some level we *have* to separate people from the government they live under. Often they have voted against that government at every opportunity they've had for their entire life. I'm not saying that these sorts of political questions should never have any effect on choice of venue for conferences, but I think you're taking this argument much too far, to a place where essentially every choice of venue could be disputed. It is extremely hard to find a government in the world that is not involved to some degree or another in an ongoing violation of human rights. That, sadly, is the world we live in. I completely support you in your personal (and collective) decision to decide to boycott certain conference venues. There are countries to which I personally refuse to travel as well for various reasons. I also believe that a sufficiently substantial boycott should be taken into account when deciding venues, if for practical reasons if nothing else. But *please* explicitly distinguish between the actions of governments and the actions of citizens of that government and assume good faith and good will of Debian community members unless you have concrete reasons to believe otherwise. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>