Chess champion to miss Saudi Arabia tournament over women's rights
I was reading the justifications of women who are attending and they generally have 3 things to say:<p>1) All countries are at different places in the march towards human rights. But participating in a women&#x27;s sporting event in countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia is a chance to help further women&#x27;s rights in those countries as more women might want to play, become very very good, and have a high profile from which to challenge the regime. Refusing because you have to wear hijab or abaya is not worth giving up that chance to help women in such countries.<p>2) Saudi seems to be sponsoring much more prize money and accommodations. One ranked player complained that many participants had to fund their own travel in the past, that European countries aren&#x27;t willing to sponsor the tournament, and only the top 4 players received any kind of compensation at all in the past. In Saudi it is supposed to be a better prize and travel is comped. One player said that such pitiful prize compensation as in the past is no less oppressive than having to wear a hijab.<p>3) Only one player mentioned this but I think it was worth mentioning. She said that human and women&#x27;s rights are bad in Saudi but human and women&#x27;s are ignored in other countries (for example, China multiple times in the past 20 years, Russia right after its annexation of Ukraine) the championship is in, and the &#x27;principled&#x27; chess players never speak up then.<p>I think the last point is most revealing. Many of the players who boycott are concerned with regulations that affect them personally (I have to wear this. I won&#x27;t be allowed to do this), and very few of them will ever care about the human rights violations or even women&#x27;s rights violations that don&#x27;t affect them. And of course we are not immune to this way of thinking either. It is easy for us to empathize when we have to go through what others go through. In China though (for example), when we are not having our family size culled and we are not being ethnically replaced with Han Chinese in our homelands, and we are not being suspiciously disappeared by the government like Ughyur Muslims, then we don&#x27;t empathize enough to boycott a chess championship. We are not as up in arms about human rights and all this when it affects people who are not us. How many of us actually take our respective governments to task for their own rights violations (if you&#x27;re American, a few years back, they bombed out an active, operating Red Cross Hospital, just as an example)?