British authorities said Monday they blocked Hasan Piker, a Turkish American online streamer, and another political commentator from entering the U.K. to speak at public events.
Piker, a liberal political commentator who is frequently critical of U.S. President Donald Trump, Israel and the war in Gaza, has 2.8 million followers on Twitch.
The Home Office said that the electronic travel authorization, or ETA, for Piker and Cenk Uygur, who hosts the “Young Turks” online political talk show and is reportedly Piker’s uncle, were canceled “on the grounds that their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.”
“Decisions to refuse or cancel an ETA on these grounds are based solely on an assessment of the potential risk an individual may pose to U.K. society,” the Home Office said.
Piker and Uygur were due to speak at SXSW London, a culture, technology and creativity festival, this month. Uygur was also expected to give a speech at the Oxford Union, the prestigious student debating society.
“A sad state of affairs where obviously the interests of Israel take the highest priority,” Piker said on his YouTube channel.
Uygur said on X that he had been banned “for criticizing Israel. Are we free any more?”
Piker has faced criticism over some of his comments on the Hamas militant group, which is considered a terrorist organization in the U.K. and the U.S., among other countries.
Independent state or not, there certainly was no instance of a “Palestinian” people “govern[ing] themselves” (whatever that may mean - the majority of the world, including Israel/Palestine, has never had anything resembling a democratic government).
The Ottomans themselves were by definition a small dynastic elite that ruled over a multi-ethnic, multilingual empire. They didn’t give a shit about what “Palestinians” thought about the governance of this area except insofar as it suited their own perceived interests.
The Ottomans didn’t officially call this region “Palestine” in its own administrative divisions though that name existed as an unofficial designation for the rough area.
The Sykes-Picot borders were drawn from the rectums of some drunk European aristocrats who barely knew the region. On which sides of those borders people ended up is largely a historical accident.