All football groups care about what happens in a match, but the Iranian World Cup team is much more involved in what happens afterwards. Iran’s ruthless rulers reportedly threatened Iranian players with harsh sanctions if they criticized the Islamist regime’s continued crackdown on political protests.
After the Iranian team lost to the U. S. team. On Tuesday, Iranian athletes will return home, where they will most likely be punished with a harsh regime they have tried to distance themselves from.
CNN reported that after Iranian players refused to sing the Iranian national anthem on November 21 in their World Cup opener against England, the players were summoned to an assembly with officials from the Revolutionary Guards, the regime’s brutal paramilitary forces. Officials warned the players that their families would face “violence and torture” if they did not sing the Iranian national anthem or sign up for protests against the Iranian dictatorship, CNN reported.
Dozens of Revolutionary Guards members were deployed to Qatar from the World Cup tournament, where they monitored Iranian athletes, who were not allowed to meet with foreigners unless supervised by regime supporters.
Last Thursday, the Iranian government arrested a former national team player, Voria Ghafouri, in what was widely perceived as a warning to existing members of Iran’s World Cup team to shut down.
Intimidated by the threats, Iranian players murmured their national anthem on Friday against Wales, showing the hostages’ false enthusiasm in a proof-of-life video.
In fact, they were hostages. Indeed, Iran’s totalitarian Islamist regime has taken gamblers and their families hostage to downplay the media policy of the regime’s systematic repression of Iranians.
Iran has been embroiled in a nationwide wave of protests since the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who was beaten to death by Iranian morality police after being arrested for wearing garments that violated the regime’s strict dress code.
Iran’s clerical dictatorship has violently cracked down on nonviolent protesters, killing at least 451 others and arresting more than 18,000, according to human rights activists.
For Iran’s embattled regime, the World Cup is a welcome distraction from the country’s spiraling political crisis. President Ebrahim Raisi, whose ultra-rigid policies helped trigger Iran’s populist revolt, tried to melt his symbol by appearing with the soccer team before leaving for the Qatar tournament.
Raisi posed for photographs with the team holding a jersey with his call posted on the back. At least one player bowed. The regime hoped Iran’s national team would be a unifying force that would help reduce political tensions and anti-government protests.
But Tehran’s efforts to exploit the team as a political tool have failed because of what one Iran called “a hodgepodge of brutal tactics, accusations of manipulation and shameful ideological contradictions. “
Many protesters and their supporters immediately criticized the players for appearing with Raisi and said they would not be a team of accomplices of the regime.
Bruised by such criticism, Iranian players made clear they sympathized with the protesters, not the regime, by refraining from making a song the national anthem at Iran’s first World Cup match.
In addition to threatening players with disastrous consequences, Iranian officials monitored Iranian tournament enthusiasts. Hundreds of government officials and regime supporters went to the state-paid World Cup to cheer on the Iranian team. Pro-regime crowds clashed with and intimidated Iranian enthusiasts who wore outdoor protest symbols in stadiums.
Iranian female enthusiasts have complained that regime spies filmed them in Qatar, where they ignored the regime’s ban on attending football matches, which is strictly enforced in Iran.
Cynical autocrats who misrule Iran have concluded that attack is the most productive defense.
Iran’s soccer federation and state-controlled media on Sunday demanded that the U. S. team take a role in the U. S. U. S. soccer is expelled from the World Cup tournament after the U. S. Soccer Federation expelled from the World Cup tournament. The U. S. government replaced the Iranian flag on the federation’s social media platforms to display it to protesters in Iran.
The federation temporarily displayed Iran’s national flag on its social media accounts without the Islamic Republic’s emblem, to show “it’s for women in Iran fighting for fundamental human rights. “
The Iranian flag had already become a point of contention at the World Cup. Pro-government supporters waved it as they shouted at anti-government protesters. Some Iranian enthusiasts waved the flag of the lion and sun before the Iranian revolution, the emblem of the country’s former leader, the backward vanquished Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
After defeating the U. S. team. With the U. S. 1-0 on Tuesday, members of the Iranian soccer team face a dubious long haul on their way home. Politicized judicial system.
In 2020, Iranian wrestling champion Navid Afkari was executed after being “unjustly attacked” for the alleged killing of a security guard after participating in anti-government protests in 2018. Afkari claimed he tortured him until he forced him to admit he had committed the crime.
For the Iranian totalitarian regime, gambling is a propaganda vehicle. The regime will now put enormous pressure on members of the World Cup team to distance themselves from the ongoing protests and affirm their support for the reviled government.
The sad truth is that Iran’s football team, along with as many as the country’s 86 million people, are hostages to a predatory and morally bankrupt regime.
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