Sport may be a blunt tool of social change, but it’s time to take a stand against Israel | Sport politics

8 comments

1. Rich coming from a fucking British newspaper of all places!

   These scumbags were bombing Yemeni cities as recent as last month.

   [UK, US carry out air strikes on Yemen, including Sanaa](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/10/uk-us-carry-out-strikes-on-yemen-including-sanaa)

   You never hear about it, or be surprised by it because of how normalised it has become for the US and their lackey Brits to bomb some random country somewhere.

   Anyway, keep politics out of sports. A sports tournament should only be about excellence in the sport and not other BS.

2. I’m really fucking tired of people inserting politics into sports. No, we should not ban Israelis, and we should bring the Russians back too. All of this is a lot more fun when you can beat these nations on the mats. A figure skating medal without the Russians in the competition doesn’t even seem legitimate. There will be an asterisk next to it for an eternity. It’s like a basketball medal without defeating US – meaningless.

3. After over a year of being on the brink of starvation, *checks notes* zero people have died from starvation.

   Can we get back to this when somebody actually dies of starvation?

4. The main reason that the boycott against Russian sport makes sense (including and especially in the olympics) is that the Russian state apparatus is very much enmeshed in sports infrastructure, ownership, and politics.

   This is not the case for Israeli sport.

5. This is amazing. I hope every reporter who been whitewashing these atrocities with their mealy-mouthed “toddlers die in the area of Israeli security operation, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry claims” doublespeak bullshit reads it and hangs their head in shame. Because they just got shown up by a fucking football reporter.

   >But we know, or we should know, right from wrong. Killing children is wrong. A government that declares some humans as more worthless than others is wrong. Presiding over a famine is wrong. How is this complicated? How is this the start of a debate, rather than the end of one? How is it remotely possible to frame this horrific extravaganza of violence as the benign option, and the resistance to it — even when it comes from Jews themselves — as some kind of sublimated hatred, rather than the simplest act of conscience there is?

   >To resist this Israeli regime is not incompatible with resisting a Saudi World Cup or a Russian Olympic team or a Taliban ban on women’s sport. Indeed this is one and the same resistance: a resistance to the doctrine of untouchable power, a resistance to violence and othering as the solution to our common problems. And even if sport is a blunt and pointless tool of social change, it must nonetheless be deployed. Because there remains – even in this warped, fucked fairground mirror of a world – a thing called right and a thing called wrong.

6. Israel was attacked by the elected government of Gaza, no? If that is true, the assumption must be that the October attacks were done in the name of the rest of the Palestinians. Thus, elimination that which attacked you is a reasonable response and no one should tell you when to stop. America wouldn’t do it, no state would do it.

7. And yet the author gives Iran a free pass? If Iran hadn’t armed and funded Hamas and Hezbollah and wage war against Israel via these proxies 7 Oct would never have happened.

8. all my homies hate israel. Not israelis. But, the government.

   Good, more and more people need to denounce that facist. They were prosecuted at some point, sure, but that doesn’t give you a permanent hall pass to fucking murder anyone. They need to be trialed, netawhatever needs to be put in jail for the rest of his life, and the EU and specially the UK need to guarantee the palestinians a place to live.

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