Excuse the belated (five days) reporting; I’ve been a bit busy lately.
From the least-likely-threat-imaginable department: the band Oyama was forced to cancel their appearance at the first of a series of concerts kicking off in the US after the US denied entrance to one of their members. Take a gander at the picture above and guess who the likely terrorist is.
If you guessed the girl in the center, Júlía Hermannsdóttir, you win a cookie!
Despite numerous attempts to find out why — from the airlines, the US embassy, and other institutions — the only clarification that they could get is that she is simply not permitted to go to the US. Normally travel between the US and Iceland is VISA-free and painless.
Júlía is not a newcomer to the US; she lived in the US for six years while attending college and has regularly traveled to the country — most recently in April of last year. Of course, we all know the horrible truth: that her attending college was just an excuse to case targets, and the formation of Oyama and its careful cultivation of a fan base through numerous concerts and releasing multiple albums was clearly just a ruse to give them an excuse to bring secret agent Júlía to the US to carry out her dastardly deeds!
While cancellation of the first concert(s) was inevitable, the band decided to attempt to fix the problem by applying for an artists’ VISA for Júlía. This appears to have worked, as they yesterday updated their page to indicate their appearance at one of the concerts in the series, in Philadelphia.
Not everybody, however, has been so lucky. While Júlía’s ban was inexplicable, all too explicable was the case of Meisam Rafiei, an Icelander born in Iran who was caught up in Trump’s Muslim Ban while attempting to travel for a Taekwando tournament. Even worse was the British schoolteacher, Muhammed Juhel Miah, pulled off an airplane at Keflavík on a trip to New York with his students, and prohibited entry to the country.
But at least in the case of the suspected Shoegaze Bomber, her story appears to have reached a “good” ending. Play on!