Iran’s lady footballers: Let them play!

Football is the great global game: the closest thing we have to a connective cultural tissue that binds our species across national and cultural borders. But only in a world so upside down could “the Beautiful Game” be run by an organisation as corrupt as FIFA and by a man as rotten to the core as FIFA President Sepp Blatter. Only Sepp Blatter, whose reputation for degeneracy approaches legend, would hire a war criminal like Henry Kissinger to head “a committee of wise persons” aimed at “rooting out corruption” in his organisation. And only these two twinning avatars of amorality would use “the Beautiful Game” as an instrument of Islamaphobia. On Sunday, moments before Iran’s women’s team was due to take to the pitch and play in an Olympic qualifier against Jordan, the team was disqualified for wearing their traditional full-body tracksuits and hijabs. Jordan was granted a 3-0-forfeit victory, crushing the lauded Iranian team’s chances to go to the 2012 London Games. As the Iranian players and officials tearfully objected, they were told that they had violated FIFA rules stating that: “Players and officials shall not display political, religious, commercial or personal messages or slogans in any language or form on their playing or team kits.” The team was also informed that since 2007 FIFA has held the view that wearing a hijab while playing “could cause choking injuries”. There are two problems with this argument. The first is that it’s asinine. “Hijab soccer choking deaths,” doesn’t exactly send the Google search engine a-humming. But far more problematic is that the team had already received assurances from FIFA that the uniforms were in compliance. They had even played preliminary rounds without a blip from Blatter. [Source]