They cried all day
Their robot may have permission to travel, but six teenage Afghan inventors are staying put this summer.
They’ve been rejected for a one-week travel visa to escort their robot to the inaugural FIRST Global Challenge – an international robotics competition happening in Washington DC in mid-July.
The all-girl team representing Afghanistan hails from Herat, a city of half a million people in the western part of the country. To interview for their visas, the girls risked a 500 mile trek cross-country to the American embassy in Kabul – the site of several recent suicide attacks and one deadly truck bomb in early June that killed at least 90 people. Despite the recent violence, the teenagers braved the trip to the country’s capital not once, but twice, hoping a second round of interviews might help secure their 7-day visas after the team was rejected on its first try. But no luck.
Roya Mahboob, who founded Citadel software company in Afghanistan, and was the country’s first female tech CEO, brought the group of girls together for the project.
It’s a very important message for our people” Mahboob says. “Robotics is very, very new in Afghanistan.”
She says when the girls first heard the bad news about their visas, “they were crying all the day.”
But this is about the safety of the American people. Maybe those teenage girls would have killed a bunch of people once they got here. You can’t prove they wouldn’t have! Therefore it’s necessary to tell them to stay home.
And Donnie figures other countries won’t take the same attitude – with plenty more justification – to our businesses, students, tourists, sailors and soldiers… because of what, bombs? It’s not as though we’re less threatening than a handful of bright Afghan girls.
I for one don’t want their steenking burkas here.
God damn it. Infuriating.
Great work. As if it isn’t hard enough for a group of girls in Afghanistan to get involved in something like this. I for one am not scared of having a group of bright teenagers in the country for a week. I think the US would benefit from contact with them.
But iknklast, you can’t be too careful these days. Unlike previous generations, we live in uncertain times.
Could be that President Pussygrabber is a divine gift, sent from Heaven to steer us through to a bright and glorious gold-plated future. He will take us to the top of his very own gold-plated tower and show us his diamond studded promised land.
Promised to himself; by himself. ALL by himself.
Through himself and up himself.
My Twitter is pointing out that the Gambia team was also denied visas, and this is mentioned in the articles about the Afghanistan team. I don’t think Gambia is even on the ‘bad countries’ list, so wtf? I wish I had more information about this.
Good to know America grants more freedoms to visiting inanimate objects than to certain nationalities. And the veneer of security is as transparent as it gets: they were denied entry due to supposedly being a security risk, citing ISIS using remote-controlled bombs… but their robot was held by customs for weeks to check for just that. And subsequently cleared.
So the Trump administration is barring them entry due to concerns over their putative bomb, but are letting said bomb in because they checked and it isn’t a bomb.
Obviously this is not logically defensible. It is pure bigotry.
iknklast: Seriously–having an all-girl Afghani team compete in something like this would be a major propaganda victory for the U.S. and the West over the Islamofascists of the Taliban. “See what happens when you let young women excel?” It would cut right to the heart of Sharia misogyny.
And so we see, once again, the travel ban for what it is–surrender to ISIS, to the Taliban, and to Al Queda. Fucking President Gutless.
The “extreme vetting” nonsense is more widespread than I had realized.
http://www.wbur.org/artery/2017/07/03/artist-visas
“Programmers at the Boston Early Music Festival (BEMF), a Grammy-winning event that caters to Renaissance and Baroque music enthusiasts, were surprised and dismayed in May, when, for the first time, U.S. immigration services denied four of the 26 visa applications BEMF applied for. The visas were for the four young women of the German group, Boreas Quartett Bremen. The group, who plays handmade recorders, had to cancel their performance in Boston.”
“In 2016, the U.S. issued more than 63,866 O and P visas, which enable athletes, entertainment groups or other people with extraordinary abilities in the sciences or business and those traveling with them to visit the U.S. for short term contractual employment and performances. In March and April of this year, the only months the State Department has released data for, the U.S issued only 697 of those visas.”
Fremage @8,
Exactly. It would be very message we should be sending… on all levels. And maybe these girls and their families would see (not that they already haven’t) that hijabs are nothing more than a symbol of subjugation (being ethnic Persian, they could even be models for girls in Iran). Which is why it’s so f***ing frustrating.
Oh crap. How loathsome. Thank you for the link, Sackbut. (I note the relevance of your nym.)
[…] Sackbut alerted us to this infuriating clusterfuck: […]
I do not, for an instant, believe the Trump administration has any real interest in reducing tensions with the Muslim world, nor actually encouraging modernisation, secularisation, there or anywhere else, nor undercutting the appeal of violent Islamism. Let alone, of all things, encouraging women to succeed in STEM disciplines, in Afghanistan or anywhere else.
… on that former thing: it’s no more in his interest than it’s in the interest of _any_ would-be strongman who relies upon a perceived/created need for ‘security’ to maintain power. An infinite supply of visceral but largely ineffectual terror events supplies that need perfectly. Polarised, broken, angry, powerless populations supply these, in turn.
There’s always been a hand-in-glove relationship between extremists at odds with a security state and its masters. Violent jihadis need Trump, and he, in turn, needs them. He doesn’t want education, development, opportunities that make good on the promise of a prosperous, plural, healthily interdependent world. He wants missiles, death, and photo-opportunities in which he can strut the power of his security services. Violence overseas or at home, stirring the fear of his domestic population, either way, that’s a message he can use. Women who build robots? Hardly. Two strikes, right there. Smart women–probably among his greatest fears–and technology that doesn’t deliver missiles? Neither goes anywhere helpful for him.
And yeah, it’s an obscenity. What these women do and have done should be hope for the world, hope for the future…
So, there’s a certain horrific, depressing perfection in this story, in short. For my money, _this_ is Trumpism in a nutshell.
[…] a comment by AJ Milne on They cried all […]
[…] a post from three weeks ago, aka reporting one bad thing from Trump’s Very Large Array of Bad Things averted: the Afghan […]