FIFA’s Selective Neutrality
After Egypt defeated Australia on penalty kicks in the Round of 32 on July 3, coach Hossam Hassan held the Palestinian flag in front of fans who chanted, “free, free Palestine.” “My heart and soul are with them,” Hassan said afterward regarding the Palestinians. “May Allah grant them victory. May Allah have mercy on their martyrs.”
Then after Egypt’s quarterfinal loss to Argentina on July 7, Hassan used his press conference to deliver a passionate soliloquy for more than 4 ½ minutes on the Palestinians’ plight.
“Today, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand of them were struck by a single missile and died, while we’re still here,” Hassan said. “It’s not hard to see that the children we see can’t even find food. They’re facing diseases and epidemics that can result from a lack of food, a lack of sleep, and a lack of basic necessities.
“All nations, including Europe and America, are looking the other way. So if I don’t feel compassion as a human being, then I have no reason to live – nor does any human being on the face of the earth who is unaware of what’s happening in Palestine.”
The hypocrisy on all fronts is breathtaking.
Hassan postures as a humanitarian but cares nothing for the Israeli victims of Hamas’ barbaric attacks on Oct. 7, 2023 – victims who faced far worse than his “kind and honorable” Palestinians. Egypt postures as a Palestinian ally yet considers Palestinians to be a domestic threat and economic burden, as most Arab nations do. FIFA postures as an apolitical body that disciplines political advocacy but grants the Palestinians and their supporters an exception.
More importantly, all three parties increase the hostility against Israel and its supporters.
Egypt built a fortified border wall to protect its citizens from Hassan’s “kind and honorable” Palestinian “martyrs.” Construction began in 2009 amidst opposition from Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. Despite the wall, which extended underground to block tunnels, jihadists murdered 33 Egyptian soldiers in 2014 in two separate attacks in the northern Sinai Peninsula. One attack just 13 miles from Rafah in Gaza killed 30 soldiers.
Those attacks accelerated development of a more fortified wall and stronger countermeasures against tunnels, such as pumping water and toxic gas into them. From 2013 to 2015, Egyptian authorities forcibly evicted about 3,200 families, destroyed hundreds of acres of farmland and demolished 3,255 buildings.
“The Egyptian authorities provided residents with little or no warning of the evictions, no temporary housing, mostly inadequate compensation for their destroyed homes -- none at all for their farmland -- and no effective way to challenge their eviction, home demolition, or compensation,” Human Rights Watch stated in its report, ironically entitled, “Look For Another Homeland.”
“Egypt needs to explain why it didn’t use available technology to detect and destroy the tunnels and instead wiped entire neighborhoods off the map,” added Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s director for the Middle East and North Africa.
The steel-and-concrete wall now reaches 23 feet and extends the length of Egypt’s 7.5-mile border with Gaza. The barrier includes several lengths of barbed wire, electronic sensors and surveillance and a cleared buffer zone.
“They didn’t ask for anyone’s permission,” author Karen Hunt wrote. “The UN (United Nations) didn’t condemn Egypt for it. Western media didn’t accuse them of being an apartheid state.”
FIFA’s hypocrisy contradicts its own disciplinary code. Article 13 states that “using a sports event for demonstrations of a non-sporting nature” constitutes “offensive behavior” and violates “the principles of fair play.” Article Six outlines punishments ranging from fines to suspensions to banishment but leaves enforcement to the discretion of FIFA’s judicial bodies.
In the past, FIFA punished blatant politicking. In 2013, Croatian defender Josip Simunic received one for 10 games and missed the 2014 World Cup after instigating a chant and using a salute associated with the pro-Nazi Ustase regime during World War II. After that year’s tournament, Argentina’s soccer federation drew a fine because its players stood behind a banner proclaiming in Spanish that Britain’s Falkland Islands belonged to Argentina.
In 2016, the federations of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales received fines for having players wear black armbands featuring poppies for Armistice Day. But when it comes to Palestine or Arab/Muslim sensibilities, soccer’s international governing body exhibits far greater latitude.
During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, FIFA allowed the display of Palestinian flags while prohibiting team captains from wearing rainbow armbands to support LGBTQ activism, since Qatar criminalizes homosexuality. Morocco’s team displayed the Palestinian flag numerous times, especially after defeating Spain to reach the quarterfinals. The British group Lawyers for Israel demanded sanctions but FIFA did nothing.
“Rules only make sense if they are consistently applied,” Deutsche Welle’s Mark Meadows wrote at the time. “Whatever your view on the Middle East and the future of the Palestinian Territories, taking their flag onto a football pitch at the World Cup surely counts as a political statement.
“It is obviously difficult for FIFA to stop this. But FIFA and Qatar are not responding to the Palestinian issue because they know they have backed themselves into a corner. If rainbow armbands are a political statement then so is ‘free Palestine.’ But they don’t want to crack down on this because it will cause such a rumpus among Arabs.”
The Moroccan players’ behavior reflected the antagonistic atmosphere toward Israel in a country that supports Islamism.
“Israeli fans and reporters were met with a climate of hostility and anger that forced many of them to return to Israel,” wrote Hussein Aboubakar Mansour. “While not covered in the Western media, nearly all Israeli reporters and journalists were the subject of public humiliation, hostility, and threats. Those who have been following the story got a rare glimpse of the Israeli reality of living amidst a sea of absolute rejection and hostility”
For example, Arab fans would yell at Israeli reporters conducting interviews and tell them they did not belong in Qatar. “There is no Israel, only Palestine,” one shouted at Moav Vardy, foreign affairs reporter for the Israeli network KAN. To avoid harassment, Israeli reporters would tell Arab fans they came from other countries.
Meanwhile, local businesses refused to serve Israelis. One restaurant owner not only called security to evict an Israeli diner. The owner took the customer’s phone and deleted pictures of the restaurant’s food. Later, a driver ordered the same patron to get out of the cab in the middle of a street.
While Israelis are safer in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the hosts for this year’s World Cup, FIFA followed suit on its hypocrisy. Egypt’s federation has yet to be sanctioned for its coach’s overt advocacy. FIFA continues to allow the Palestinian flag while banning Iran’s lion-and-sun flag representing the Pahlavi dynasty before the 1979 Islamic revolution, as it did in Qatar.
That last issue matters because Iran played all three group matches in areas with large populations of Iranian expatriates. Los Angeles, where Iran played twice, has the largest such population in the United States.
The Israeli flag also was not welcome. During the game between Iran and New Zealand on June 15, security confiscated an Israeli flag one fan wore on his shoulders after warning the fan.
“Why don’t you remove that flag? When you guys remove that flag, I will remove mine,” the fan responded in reference to a Palestinian flag.
“They told me that the head of FIFA and the staff was actually pointing at me and singled me out in a stadium of 100,000 people,” the fan, named Rony, told Fox News. “Just two seats behind me, there were people with Palestinian flags. When I asked about them, they (security) said the head of FIFA didn’t care about that. They only cared about my flag in particular.”
“They said they’re going to return it to me at the end of the game, which never even happened. I looked for it, tried finding it, but they never gave it back to me. I thought we lived in America in 2026, not Nazi Germany in the 1930s.”
Some Palestinian activists want to do to Israeli soccer what the Nazis did to
German Jews in the 1930s: Isolate them from society. On June 11, the World Cup’s first day, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement issued a statement demanding that fans “raise the Palestinian flag and isolate the Zionist entity from international sport.”
In soccer, that would mean expulsion from FIFA.
The group, also known as Masar Badil, affiliates with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organization that organized numerous terrorist attacks on Western targets and airline hijacking. In the most famous, the PFLP commandeered four Western airliners within a day in 1980 and blew up three of them in Jordan after releasing all the passengers.
Masar Badil pressed “football fans, supporters, athletes, sports clubs and federations participating in World Cup activities” to “transform stadiums and sporting venues into platforms of solidarity with the Palestinian people” and “raise Palestinian flags, organize solidarity actions, launch chants and display banners opposing genocide, and demand the exclusion of the Zionist entity from all sporting, cultural and international forums.”
Before Canada’s game against Bosnia and Herzegovina in Toronto on June 12, Doha News showed activists covering a FIFA sign with a circular red banner that said, “Kick Israel out of FIFA.” The video included responses from social media. Amar Singh Chouhan challenged FIFA directly.
“Toronto activists just unfurled a HUGE “KICK ISRAEL OUT OF FIFA” banner over the FIFA installation,” Chouhan posted, with a Palestinian flag ending the sentence.
“Russia banned. Israel still in. Hypocrisy?
“FIFA, your move?”
If FIFA makes such a move against Israel’s soccer federation, soccer’s international governing body will have sacrificed its credibility on the altar of appeasement.
Joseph D’Hippolito is a contributor to IDI
Egypt kept their border closed and built a massive wall for protection. End of discussion.
Lying to infidels is baked right into the Quran. That's why I don't believe anything a Muslim says.