The Football Association and Israel

The Football Association was asked to light up the iconic arch at Wembley Stadium in the colours of the Israeli flag. They refused. This has been widely condemned. In my view sport should never “do” politics. When a friend asked me to write to the FA in support of the request to light up the arch, I politely refused on those grounds. So, in a sense, I think the FA is right. However, having virtue-signalled relentlessly on other non-sporting issues for years, there is something sinister about the fact that it won’t in this case.

The FA had footballers kneel in solidarity with a single foreign criminal who was unlawfully killed, but won’t express sympathy with more than a thousand murdered innocents. After the terrorist attack in Paris in 2015, the FA’s officials lit up the arch in French colours. They were happy to express the support many of us felt for a nation that, if presented with a big red magic button that would erase England from history, would lose lives in the stampede to press it. Yet they choose to remain neutral between the vicious, anti-semitic, baby-butcherers of Hamas and their victims. 

It was undoubtedly a mistake ever to mix sport with politics. I should not be put into a position at Craven Cottage where the nice young asian guy who sits next to me has to wonder if I am a racist when I don’t stand when our players “take the knee.” My refusal to acquiesce in virtue-signalling at the behest of the Marxist monsters of BLM isn’t racist at all but I am not at the Cottage for a political discussion. I’m there for the joy of sport and an escape from the tedium of my politically-polluted life. I deeply resent the Premier League, Football Association and indeed the club putting me in an awkward political position at a football match.

The truth is that the FA’s inconsistency arises from cowardice. On the day of the Hamas invasion, its supporters were dancing for joy (as captured on video by Countdown’s Rachel Riley and published on her Twitter feed) on a street 0.6 miles from where I live in West London. According to the 2021 census, our city’s cultural diversity is enriched by the presence 1.3 million adherents of “the religion of peace.” Quite a few of them – it seems from such celebrations – take pleasure in Hamas’s barbarism. The FA is simply unsure of just how many of them fall into that category and – given their history of violent response to perceived slights – is afraid to annoy them.

The FA might also be justified in worrying that The Metropolitan Police force service is so afraid of offending British Muslims that – if they did kick off at Wembley in the non-football sense – it wouldn’t hold them to the same legal standards as other Londoners. I wouldn’t personally be surprised to see the Met – firmly a part of Britain’s Leftist Establishment – side with them.

I don’t agree with those calling for the police to suppress pro-Hamas celebrations or demonstrations. Hamas is legally designated as a terrorist group in the UK and it is a crime to support them, but I think that’s a legal mistake. They are no more revolutionary, violent or bloodthirsty than most social science lecturers in our universities and no-one is calling (nor should they) for their vile Marxist ideology to be suppressed. Besides, I welcome their free speech. As a practical matter, I need to know who are the murderous sorts among my neighbours. I need that knowledge to inform my decisions about my socialising, my shopping and indeed whether I choose to keep living where I do.

I have every confidence in the Israel Defence Force’s ability to respond appropriately to Hamas. I am on Israel’s side – as every civilised human should now be – and simply wish them (as they would wish themselves) a speedy victory with minimum bloodshed. I am more interested in what I have learned in the past week about the state of my own nation and its capital city. Evil is among us and our response to it is – as evidenced by the FA’s pusillanimity – far too naive, timid and weak. I fear we are going to pay a price for that before too long.