Wookey dijo [Sat, Jul 27, 2019 at 08:37:57PM +0100]: > Perhaps so, but a big part of the difficulty round this issue is > people calling things which aren't (like thinking the settler movement > is deeply unjust) 'anti-semitic'. It makes it almost impossible to have > a sensible conversation around the subject. > > Boycotting Israel, or at least settlers, seems sensible to me for the > same reasons that it was sensible against South Africa. And holding > debconf there seems like a bad plan for the same reason that a lot of > bands got abuse for playing Sin City in the 1980s. The example you present is quite good - Many people inside Israel boycott the settler movement. Zionists towards the left of the political spectrum very often do. But I wish to bring this what I consider an _important_ step beyond that: While having DebConf at country X will quite probably benefit said country (if for nothing else, for the tourism-related expenses we do... although many of us are lousy, cheap tourists), its impact is negligible. But the effort that has been put -and that remains to be put- in organizing the conference by some very specific members of our community, by people that have been close to us, whom we have interacted with. Running a DebConf means putting your soul into the project for a year, and quite probably taking a nontrivial financial hit, because you will be catering for a group of geeks instead of doing proper work. This is the main point I argue. Having been part of the organizing team for DebConf and for other international conferences in Mexico, I am more than aware how the "drugs-gangs-bad hombres" security scare dampens our efforts. Boycotting a DebConf in Israel should have been done by the interested people when it was still at the bidding level - It would have not been nice, but it would have been ... Fair. Pushing for this political stance now, when our friends have been working on rearranging their life objectives for the whole year is just not right. I am quite heartfelt and saddened.
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