FIFA plays flag football against Iranian protesters
A California court says FIFA can ban a pre-revolutionary Iranian flag favored by Tehran's opponents. Actually keeping it out of stadiums is harder.
LOS ANGELES — Iran's players arrived back in the United States yesterday to play Belgium. For supporters of Team Melli, a cat-and-mouse game with FIFA over political expression continues. Soccer's global governing body has included Iran's pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag — a favorite symbol of those protesting the régime in Tehran — on its list of "materials, including but not limited to banners, flags, fliers, apparel and other paraphernalia, that are of a political, offensive and/or discriminatory nature" banned under its stadium code of conduct.
A Los Angeles County Superior Court court judge upheld the ban last week after a challenge from the Southern California-based Institute for Voice of Liberty, which argued that FIFA was targeting “protected symbolic and political speech” in violation of California law. Actually enforcing the ban against a flood of fans entering the stadium with the emblem on a wide variety of paper and cloth goods has been tougher. As Iran’s players came out to examine the field about 90 minutes before kickoff of their first match, on Monday night against New Zealand, a stadium official approached a 26-year-old Orange County woman who was holding the flag.
Under FIFA’s rules, he told her, she could wear the Lion and Sun but not “display” it. He lowered his voice to share a loophole: If she wrapped herself in the flag, it would become an item of clothing, exempting it from FIFA’s ban. “If it’s not supposed to be political, why can you have the post-revolutionary flag and not the pre-revolutionary flag?”
the woman remarked after. “And why isn’t like anyone else’s flag banned, like the Venezuelan flag, or whatever?” The pre-Islamic Revolution flag has become a point of tension reflecting a deeper struggle over Iranian identity, dissent and representation on the world stage.
It has has become a common symbol of protest amid the war in Iran, and when the flag of the Islamic Republic was rolled out on the field on Monday night, lots of fans c
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