Bad sports “There is a fundraiser going on right now in an NBA arena for an army that is being investigated for war crimes. How can the NBA be okay with this?”
Dave Zirin is the coauthor, with John Carlos, of “The John Carlos Story”, and author of “Brazil’s Dance with the Devil: The World Cup, the Olympics and the Fight for Democracy”, “Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love” and “A People’s History of Sports in the United States, as well as the collection of essays “Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports”. This article first appeared at http://thenation.com
pay grade. Maybe if you raise taxes here and increase my salary, I’ll have an answer.” (I am waiting for comment from the Barclays Center about whether this counterdemonstration received any kind of official approval.) As for the protesters, their presence was animated by the summer’s ongoing war on Gaza. I asked Pam Sporn from Jewish Voice for Peace what she would say to those who would deem a sporting event an inappropriate place for a protest. She said: “One of the most horrifying images from Israel’s Gaza onslaught was the death of the four boys playing soccer on the beach. Their names are Mohamed Ramez Bakr, 11 years old, Ahed Atef Bakr and Zakaria Ahed Bakr, both 10, and Ismael Mohamed Bakr, 9. I say their names because Palestinians are so dehumanized that their deaths don’t even register to much of this country. I’m here tonight because you cannot use a basketball game to honor an army that killed those boys. It is morally bankrupt. Jews and non-Jews have an obligation to speak out.” Mindy Gershon of the organization Adalah-NY then commented, “If you believe that we need a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to hold Israel accountable, then we need to be here when basketball teams come to play.” Gershon then looked over at the counterdemonstrators and said, “We have to hold a mirror to the faces of people who don’t believe Palestinians are human beings.” I also spoke to Nets season-ticket holder Ahmed Eltouny, who showed up wearing a custom-made Brooklyn Nets jersey with the number 48, the year of the creation of the Israeli state, and the word Palestine along the back. Eltouny said: “When I first found out this game was happening weeks ago, it left a bad taste in my mouth, and I planned on being out here. When you stage a game like this, it normalizes relations with a country that habitually ignores the United Nations and any external authority on their actions. There is a fundraiser going on right now in an NBA arena for an army that is being investigated for
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war crimes. How can the NBA be okay with this?” _____________ NOT ALL the protesting took place outside the arena. People from the organizations NYC Solidarity with Palestine and Direct Action Front for Palestine unfurled a banner in the stands during the second quarter that read, “We Are Brooklyn. Don’t Play with Apartheid #BDS.” One of the participants, Amin Husain, said to me afterward, “Fans were aggressive. They snatched the banner. Security tried to escort us out, but we evaded them. Others in our group then took out a Palestinian flag and were assaulted by fans. We escaped the assaults but made it outside. We told police what happened, but they did not do anything. “While this was happening inside, I was also able to speak with local resident and Nets fan Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, who stopped by with his two small children and surveyed the scene. “This should be a community space,” he said to me. “Brooklyn is a close-knit community. I’m upset that the divisive vibe carried by FIDF would be brought into the place we call home.” One Israeli counterdemonstrator named Eli, who was pointedly not using profanity or slurs, criticized the Palestinian protesters and said to me, “Why don’t they protest the deaths in Syria or the human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia or ISIS? But they have every right to be here. In the U.S. as well as Israel, you can protest and be heard, not so much in these other places.” He then looked over at the cursing young men on his side of the barricades and said, “That look doesn’t go so well with my message to you.” Also surveying the counterdemonstrators from inside the barricades was Arya Shirazi of Queens. Shirazi said to me, “When I see all that anger and that kind of behavior from those supporting FIDF, Maccabi Tel Aviv and Israel’s actions, and then I look at us, it’s heartening. Look at us. We are racially and ethnically diverse. We are young and old. We are the people, and that’s why we are going to see a free Palestine.” CT