February 13, 2013, - 3:24 pm
Dubai Did What? The Double Standard on Arab Muslim & Israeli Jewish Soccer Players
For over a month, the mainstream media has been publishing–and readers have been sending me–stories about Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, the Israeli pro soccer team that recently added its first Muslim soccer player. I wonder why this is news when 1) every single other Israeli pro soccer team has Arab and/or Muslim players, and 2) I have yet to read a single mainstream media news story about the lack of Jewish and/or Israeli players on any of the Gaza or Palestinian Authority soccer teams or any soccer teams anywhere in dozens of Arab and Muslim countries around the world. Or the fact that Israeli Jews can’t even enter most of these countries, period. Why isn’t that news?
Heck, Lebanese boys who were born and raised in Lebanon cannot even play on Lebanese soccer teams because they are of Palestinian descent, but the only place I read about that was in one story on an Arab media website. You’ll never see it in the New York Times or the self-hating Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA), both of which drooled over reporting on Beitar Jerusalem and the unhappiness of only a few Beitar Jewish fans over hiring a man from an openly anti-Semitic religion to their team.
And, then, there is Dubai and its treatment of an Israeli Jewish soccer player, which gets no mention in either the New York Times or the JTA or any of the thousands of mainstream media news outlets that covered the story on Beitar Jerusalem. I could find only three news outlets, two of them Jewish publications, that mention the plight of Itay Shechter (also spelled, Schechter). Ironically, the third (and the original news source of the story), The National–an Abu Dhabi/United Arab Emirates news outlet–publishes this story that the New York Times and the JTA will not:
The English Premier League football team Swansea City considered cancelling their mid-season training camp in Dubai because their Israeli player would have been refused entry on grounds of his nationality, said Michael Laudrup, the club’s manager.
Instead of travelling to the UAE with the team on Monday, Itay Shechter was granted permission to train in Israel with Hapoel Tel Aviv, his former club. Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: apartheid, Beitar, Beitar Jerusalem, Beitar Jerusalem FC, Beitar Jerusalem Football Club, Dubai, Dubai Aerospace Enterprise Ltd ., English Premier League, HaPoel Tel Aviv, Islam, Islamic apartheid, Israel, Itay Menachem Shechter, Itay Schechter, Itay Shechter, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jews, Jihad, JTA, Michael Laudrup, Swansea City