Excerpt:
The executives at Delta Airlines have apparently never heard the old joke about landing a plane in the Middle Eastern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is the one where the pilot announces, "Welcome to Saudi Arabia, please set your watches back a thousand years." The backward Saudi kingdom will in fact gain a new business partner in Delta, which has dug its heels in on its decision to allow Saudi Arabian Airlines (SAA) to join its Sky Team Alliance, despite the fact that such a relationship may put the American carrier in a position of having to ban Jews or holders of Israeli passports from boarding flights in New York or Washington, D.C. bound for Jeddah.
Despite denials by Delta last Friday in a written statement explaining that the carrier "does not discriminate nor do we condone discrimination against any of our customers in regards to age, race, nationality, religion or gender," the company is seemingly engaged in semantic hair-splitting. While saying that Delta neither operates directly in Saudi Arabia nor engages in "code-sharing" (one carrier markets service and places its passengers on another carrier's flights) with airlines that serve that country, Delta's agreement with SAA allows passengers to book tickets on multiple airlines. Furthermore, the American carrier admits that "it's important to realize that visa requirements to enter any country are dictated by that nation's government, not the airlines, and they apply to anyone entering the country regardless of whether it's by plane, bus or train," a Delta spokesman wrote on the company's blog.