With the arrest in Switzerland of senior officials from world soccer’s governing body FIFA, the corruption scandal now seems to have taken the spotlight from the Palestinian bid to have Israel and its national team suspended from the organization.
Here comes the New York Times to the rescue lest its readers forget about the Palestinian campaign. Just in time to give the Palestinian propaganda effort a shot in the arm, Palestinian soccer player Iyad Abu Gharqoud gets op-ed space to give Israel a kicking.
According to him:
Today, our players are frequently arrested and detained. Last year, two of our most talented young players were shot and wounded by Israeli forces at a checkpoint. The border police reported that the young men were about to throw a bomb; in fact, they were on their way home from training at our national stadium in the West Bank. According to The Nation, they were both shot in the feet, sustaining injuries that have ended their soccer careers.
Israel has also tried to block players from other countries from entering Palestine to play against us. And during last year’s Gaza conflict, Israeli jets bombed our soccer fields and recreational areas. Israel’s policies have succeeded in making the beautiful game ugly.
While Gharqoud references The Nation as the supposedly credible source for the story of the two players “shot in the feet,” the facts were comprehensively debunked by Elder of Ziyon last year as yet another piece of anti-Israel propaganda.
As for the charge that Israeli jets bombed soccer fields and recreational areas, it is hardly surprising considering Hamas terrorists have fired rockets into Israel from precisely those locations as this IDF graphic from the 2012 conflict illustrates.
Gharqoud complains that Israel restricts the movement of Palestinian soccer players. This is not, however, to prevent them from playing soccer. Indeed only last week a player was detained at the Jordan crossing. Why? The Times of Israel reports:
An Israeli security source told Israel Radio that the player, Sameh Marawbe, was detained for security reasons and was arrested six months ago for receiving funds and messages from Hamas representatives in Qatar to pass on to Hamas members in the West Bank city of Qalqilya.
Gharqoud includes enough references to show that his article is less about soccer and more about another opportunity for some Israel bashing in the NY Times:
Soccer is a beautiful game, but it can be cruel, too — and not just in the near-misses and penalty shootouts. One of the ironies of my professional career is that it has brought me tantalizingly close to Beersheba, the city in southern Israel once known as Bir Saba — an Arab community that was expelled in 1948, my family included.
Gharqoud is not concerned with Israeli control over the Palestinian territories. It’s all about 1948 and painting Israel as a state born in sin.
And this is followed by the classic Palestinian propaganda tool of promoting the boycott of Israel as an apartheid state:
There is a powerful precedent for our call for soccer sanctions against Israel. FIFA established the principle of such action nearly 40 years ago, when it voted to expel South Africa following the 1976 Soweto uprising. The discrimination and harassment that we Palestinians face recall the policies of apartheid.
Ultimately, the Palestinians are hijacking soccer to score political goals against Israel. Soccer is on the front pages of the world’s media right now. The New York Times, however, has decided to become a cheerleader for Palestinian propaganda and should be given the red card for doing so.
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