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posted by on Monday February 27 2017, @05:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the flying-while-non-american dept.

A Vancouver man was denied entry into the United States after a US Customs and Border Patrol officer read his profiles on the gay hookup app Scruff and the website BBRT.

[...] André, a 30-year-old Vancouver set decorator who declined to give his full name for fear of retaliation from US Customs, describes the experience as "humiliating."[He] says he was planning to visit his boyfriend, who was working in New Orleans. But when he was going through Customs preclearance at Vancouver airport last October, he was selected for secondary inspection, where an officer took his phone, computer and other possessions, and demanded the passwords for his devices.

"I didn't know what to do. I was scared, so I gave them the password and then I sat there for at least an hour or two. I missed my flight," André says. "He came back and just started grilling me. 'Is this your email?' and it was an email attached to a Craigslist account for sex ads. He asked me, 'Is this your account on Scruff? Is this you on BBRT?' I was like, 'Yes, this is me.'"

[...] "I could tell just by his nature that he had no intentions of letting me through. They were just going to keep asking me questions looking for something," he says. "So I asked for the interrogation to stop. I asked if I go back to Canada am I barred for life? He said no, so I accepted that offer."

A month later, André attempted to fly to New Orleans again. This time, he brought what he thought was ample proof that he was not a sex worker: letters from his employer, pay stubs, bank statements, a lease agreement and phone contracts to prove he intended to return to Canada.

When he went through secondary inspection at Vancouver airport, US Customs officers didn't even need to ask for his passwords — they were saved in their own system. But André had wiped his phone of sex apps, browser history and messages, thinking that would dispel any suggestion he was looking for sex work. Instead, the border officers took that as suspicious.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:39PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @04:39PM (#472344)

    That's kinda like saying that ... Jesus is Christian

    So you mean it is incorrect?

    Ignoring the tense (these should be past tense, not present), Jesus was not Christian. Jesus was Jewish. The followers of Jesus were (or were to become) Christian, not Jesus himself.

    I'm not sure about Allah, but I am guessing (I am not 100% sure) that he was not "Muslim" too. It was probably a movement which started in his wake.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 27 2017, @05:08PM (3 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 27 2017, @05:08PM (#472371) Journal

    "Christian" means "a follower of Christ" - and I imagine that it's difficult, even for a God, or a Son of a God to follow himself. (Metaphysicists may argue that point - or not.)

    Allah isn't a person at all. Allah is the name of God. The name derives from one or more forms of Yahweh, I believe. Let me do a search . . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Islam [wikipedia.org] That link should suffice to show that Islam's God is supposedly the same God that Jews worship.

    Better link here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allah [wikipedia.org]

    "The etymology of the word Allāh has been discussed extensively by classical Arab philologists.[17] Grammarians of the Basra school regarded is as either formed "spontaneously" (murtajal) or as the definite form of lāh (from the verbal root lyh with the meaning of "lofty" or "hidden").[17] Others held that it was borrowed from Syriac or Hebrew, but most considered it to be derived from a contraction of the Arabic definite article al- "the" and ilāh "deity, god" to al-lāh meaning "the deity", or "the God".[17] The majority of modern scholars subscribe to the latter theory, and view the loanword hypothesis with skepticism.[18]

    Cognates of the name "Allāh" exist in other Semitic languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic.[19] The corresponding Aramaic form is Elah (אלה), but its emphatic state is Elaha (אלהא). It is written as ܐܠܗܐ (ʼĔlāhā) in Biblical Aramaic and ܐܲܠܵܗܵܐ (ʼAlâhâ) in Syriac as used by the Assyrian Church, both meaning simply "God".[20] Biblical Hebrew mostly uses the plural (but functional singular) form Elohim (אלהים), but more rarely it also uses the singular form Eloah (אלוהּ)."

    Since I only speak English, I can't say for sure, but I imagine that Yahweh and Allah might sound similar, when pronounced in their respective native languages. They look near enough the same to an English speaker, anyway.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:32PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 27 2017, @05:32PM (#472390)

      blah blah blah

      Did you actually have a point, or were you just so triggered by the fact that christians use the word allah too that you had to say something, anything to relieve the pressure induced by cognitive dissonance?

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 27 2017, @05:49PM (1 child)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 27 2017, @05:49PM (#472402) Journal

        It's totally pointless, like your life.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:11PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 28 2017, @05:11PM (#472876)

          Sick burn! Oh runaway you rule!!!!