Sanctions at the Genius Bar

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/12/opinion/why-is-apple-discriminating-against-iranian-americans.html?_r=1

IMAGINE if your ethnicity determined which products you were able to buy. Or if sales clerks required you to divulge your ancestry before swiping your credit card.

Some of us don’t have to imagine.

Last month, Sahar Sabet, a 19-year-old Iranian-American woman, was improperly prevented from buying an iPad at an Apple store in Alpharetta, Ga. After she had gone over the various options with two Apple sales clerks, a third clerk, who had overheard Ms. Sabet speaking Persian to her uncle, intervened. He asked what language they were speaking and, when he found out it was the language of Iran, he said she could not buy anything because “our countries do not have good relations” — never mind that she intended to give it to her sister in North Carolina. A local news account had Ms. Sabet describing a cousin in Iran as the intended recipient, an inaccuracy that was propagated last week in a Wall Street Journal opinion article defending Apple’s discriminatory behavior.