Tennis (Lack Of) Diplomacy
Decried by an Israeli player in Sweden, after a bitter victory. Andy Ram via Ynet:
Never in my career as an athlete have I encountered such hatred and such blend of sports and politics. Up until the last moment, the protestors attempted to prompt the cancelation of the David Cup match between Israel and Sweden. After we already landed here, their leader met with Swedish team captain Mats Wilander and asked him to call off the contest.
The Swedish players actually understand us and are quite embarrassed by what is happening, yet these events have completely changed my perception of Sweden, and it is doubtful whether I’ll want to come back here ever again.
The feelings within the Israel team are very grim. All the innocence that prompted us to play tennis has disappeared, and this match, which was supposed to be a beautiful moment of sports, has become completely worthless.
Via Bolt, who adds:
This wasn’t just an argument about Israel’s foreign policy:
Neutral Sweden’s mixed World War II legacy is still debated by historians. On the one hand it supplied Nazi Germany with iron ore and ball bearings and allowed the Wehrmacht to use the Swedish railway system to transport soldiers. On the other hand, spurred on by the Danes, it accepted Danish Jews marked for mass murder by the Nazis. Ultimately, the good name of Sweden was redeemed by the unparalleled heroics of one of its own – Raoul Wallenberg, who, using the cover of a Swedish diplomat, helped save tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews destined for Auschwitz, only to disappear into the Soviet Gulag. For decades, no Swedish government had the courage to demand his return from the jaws of the neighboring Russian bear.
Well, that’s because politically, historically, Sweden is a nation of collaborationist cowards. What’s to debate? But back to JPost:
INTERNATIONAL SPORTS strive to be free of politics and prejudice. But here they provide real-time proof of the poisoning of Swedish public life by biases that have echoes in Nazi Europe’s anti-Semitism. In Sweden’s third largest city, Malmo, where a virulently anti-Israel Muslim community makes up a significant percentage of the 250,000 population, the City Council voted five to four to hold the scheduled Davis Cup match between Israel and Sweden in an empty stadium, behind closed doors.
The losers are tennis players and fans of every nationality. The winners are the “Stop the Match” campaign which prevailed on the council’s Socialist-Left majority to quarantine Israelis and Jews behind an apartheid police cordon to protest Israel’s actions in the recent Gaza war.
The Malmo travesty comes on the heels of a huge international outcry after Dubai barred Shahar Pe’er from the Barclay Dubai Tennis Tournament in the UAE. Dubbed the apartheid tennis tournament, and threatened with having the games withdrawn from it, Dubai was forced to issue a visa for Andy Ram.
That controversy has had zero impact in Sweden however, as authorities announced that an Israeli tae kwondo delegation, consisting of 45 athletes and five coaches, en route to Trelleborg for the Swedish championship, was told to stay home due to Muslim threats. Not even tae kwondo – Korean for “the art of kicking and punching” – can provide protection from Sweden’s supine complicity in leading today’s anti-Israel bullies.
Spare us the alleged “public safety” nonsense. The same 7,000 anti-Israel demonstrators in downtown Malmo would have chanted the same slogans and the few dozen who attacked the police vans for the benefit of media coverage would have tossed the same projectiles had the stadium been packed with tennis fans on Saturday.
No the security card was invoked not to protect but to stigmatize Israeli athletes as pariahs.
None of this is about sports. It’s about Jews.
FOR DECADES, Sweden has allowed demagogues like Ahmed Rami , whose Radio Islam is a 22-language flagship of Holocaust denial, Jew-hatred and demonization of the State of Israel, to poison the well among the nation’s Muslim minority.
Over-the-top vilification anti-Israel rhetoric is a hallmark of a large swathe of the Swedish political establishment.
(More) Ugly details here.
Topics: Israel
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 6:09 am Comments (2) on Monday, March 9, 2009
2 Responses to “Tennis (Lack Of) Diplomacy”
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March 9th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Thank you for covering this, Jules. It is important.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:50 am
“…(H)istorically, Sweden is a nation of collaborationist cowards.”
Exactly, Jules. They can pretty up their prejudice, hate, and cowardice with politically correct jargon all they like, but if you scratch a Swede, 90% of the time, you’ll find a raving leftie. Apparently, that’s what happens after several generations of socialism.