This is a slightly wandering note about banning people. Including me.

The Under 19 cricket World Cup is going on at the moment, in Zimbabwe and Namibia.  Yesterday, India beat Afghanistan in the semi-finals to reach the final.  I decided to drop a line to the BBC and YouTube along these lines

Sorry to add a sour note, but why are Afghanistan even allowed to compete ? Their policies and behaviour towards women are, if anything, worse than the appalling apartheid policies that (rightly) got South Africa banned.

I could have added that the regulations of the International Cricket Council require participating countries to have a current women’s team – which (of course) Afghanistan does not.  I’m not on the whole in favour of banning contact with sportsmen of countries of whose governments one disapproves.  That would lead to a very, very long list, and some pretty thin regional competitions.  However, the South African case was a particular one, in that black people were not allowed to be members of their sports teams.  In fact, they even tried to prevent England selecting Basil D’Oliveira, a naturalised Briton who had emigrated here as he couldn’t play internationally in Cape Town. This seems to me to be different from having bad policies and tyrannical behaviour and moves on to denying basic humanity.  Which takes me back to Afghanistan, where it is not a racial group that is unpersonned, but a whole gender.

The BBC’s reply was extraordinary. 

Unfortunately, we’ve removed your comment because it broke the house rules

This is the text you wrote: Sorry to add a sour note, but why are Afghanistan even allowed to compete ? Their policies and behaviour towards women are, if anything, worse than the appalling apartheid policies that (rightly) got South Africa banned. Your comment was considered to have broken the following House Rule: “We reserve the right to fail comments which… Are considered likely to disrupt, provoke, attack or offend others Are racist, sexist, homophobic, sexually explicit, abusive or otherwise objectionable Contain swear words or other language likely to offend”

Of course, my comment does not in any way offend the quoted rule. We can start by agreeing that it plainly did not “contain swear words or other language likely to offend”.  It could not, by any stretch, be thought to be “racist, homophobic, sexually explicit or abusive”.  Pointing out that an Afghan team has been allowed to take part in the U19 Cricket World Cup, despite that regime’s sexist policies was the very opposite of being sexist.  So I appealed, and got the normal BBC reply – “we’re right, you’re wrong. And that’s an end to it”.

The reply I got on YouTube was more predictable, being either “don’t involve politics in sport” or “if that’s what you think, we should ban Israel”.  The first objection can simply be rebutted by pointing out that the people who brought politics into South African or Afghan sport were those that discriminated against whole genders or races, not those of us who pointed out that they were discriminating against whole genders and races.  Banning Israel from sport (or the Eurovision Song Contest, or trade) because of its appalling retaliation against the 7^th October 2023 attacks, like banning Russia because of the Ukraine invasion, is a different debate, and not one I am sure about at all.