{"id":21943,"date":"2012-10-08T12:00:40","date_gmt":"2012-10-08T11:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=21943"},"modified":"2012-10-02T21:29:56","modified_gmt":"2012-10-02T20:29:56","slug":"palestinian-soccer-player-mahmoud-sarsak-wont-play-fc-barcelonas-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/10\/palestinian-soccer-player-mahmoud-sarsak-wont-play-fc-barcelonas-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Palestinian Soccer Player Mahmoud Sarsak Won’t Play FC Barcelona’s Game"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHis slogan is the gun, whereas mine is football, whose message is love and peace. For this reason I will refuse.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

You may or may not remember the name Mahmoud Sarsak<\/a>, subject of the most important and most underreported sports story of 2012. Sarsak is the Palestinian national team soccer player who was jailed for three years without charges by the Israeli government. He was denied contact with his family, a trial and kept largely in solitary confinement for reasons that bewilder his loved ones to this day. Finally Sarsak was freed after refusing food for ninety days, losing a third of his body weight, and through his personal agony, spurring international outrage. (Having 2,000 fellow hunger strikers <\/a>certainly helped.) Organizations like Amnesty International, the 50,000-strong international union of soccer players, FIFpro and even Sepp Blatter, the morally sclerotic leader of FIFA, called for his release. Israel relented but that is clearly not the end of Sarsak\u2019s story.<\/p>\n

Now Mahmoud Sarsak is in the news again after refusing an invitation sent by the legendary team FC Barcelona to attend its October Clasico match next week [7 Oct 2012] against Real Madrid. Sarsak will not make the trip because FC Barcelona wants him there to mute planned protests against the presence of another person invited to attend the match, former Israeli Defense Forces soldier Sergeant Major Gilad Shalit. Shalit is an Israeli folk hero after being a prisoner of war for five years, captured by Hamas in Gaza on June 25, 2006, on the cusp of Israel\u2019s brutal 2006 bombing campaign in Lebanon, known as the \u201cJuly War.\u201d One of the many circulated petitions protesting the Shalit invite was specifically written and signed<\/a> by Palestinian soccer players and endorsed by entire clubs. Their petition read:<\/p>\n

\u201cWe, Palestinian footballers, athletes and sporting organizations and officials, are dismayed to learn the great team of Barcelona will host Gilad Shalit to the Clasico<\/em>, Barcelona vs. Real Madrid, on October 7th, while more than 5000 Palestinian political prisoners remain rotting, many in isolation, many with no visits, many on hunger strike with no attention or care for them to be released\u2026.Just as the effective boycott of sports teams from the South African apartheid regime showed, sporting and political life cannot be separated. We ask you to not show solidarity with the army that oppresses, imprisons and kills Palestinian sportsmen and women in Palestine.”<\/p>\n

FC Barcelona had to respond to the torrent of criticism on its website, stating that<\/a> contrary to reports it did not in fact invite Shalit itself but \u201caccepted a request\u201d from Israeli authorities to have Shalit \u201cwatch a match during his visit to Barcelona.\u201d In the same press release, Barcelona announced its intent to unite Shalit and Sarsak as a symbol of efforts to bring \u201cpeace and harmony to the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n

But this is one game Sarsak wouldn\u2019t play. As Sarsak said of Sgt. Maj. Shalit,<\/a> \u201cHis slogan is the gun, whereas mine is football, whose message is love and peace. For this reason I will refuse.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarsak also made clear that understood that the roots of the invite wasn\u2019t a desire for \u201cpeace and harmony\u201d but a response to protest. \u201cI know that the invitation was issued after heavy pressure on FC Barcelona so that it could get out of its dilemma, but the Palestinian people are not and will not be a means for [others] to get out of their dilemmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The courage of this decision is very real. Not only was Sarsak rejecting FC Barcelona but also his own Palestinian embassy officials who formally asked him to attend. He was making clear that peace and harmony with Sgt. Maj. Gilad Shalit in the current circumstances would do more harm than good, selling the idea that peace under the current circumstances of quarantine and occupation was a peace worth having. As Sarsak said, \u201cI cherish the invitation of a great club like Barcelona but not [as] an invitation for normalization.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarsak also stated that he didn\u2019t want anyone to interpret his rejection of the invite as a refusal to speak out politically about his time behind bars. \u201cIt is a great honor and it is a victory for a Palestinian prisoner and for the Palestinian cause and a victory for our principles and stances that a prisoner who is at the same time an athlete should go out and explain the suffering of his people,\u201d he said. \u201cBut in the presence of the soldier Gilad Shalit on the same stands, I will refuse this invitation.\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________<\/p>\n

Dave Zirin is the coauthor, with John Carlos, of The John Carlos Story<\/em><\/a>, and author of Bad Sports: How Owners Are Ruining the Games We Love<\/a> and A People’s History of Sports in the United States<\/a>, as well as two collections of his sports writings, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports<\/a> and What’s My Name, Fool? Sports and Resistance in the United States<\/a>. He is a columnist for TheNation.com<\/a>; his writings are also featured at his Edge of Sports<\/a> Web site.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS<\/em> <\/strong><\/span>campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation\u2019s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.<\/p>\n

DON’T BUY<\/strong> PRODUCTS WHOSE<\/strong> BARCODE<\/strong> STARTS WITH<\/strong> 729<\/strong>,<\/span> which indicates that it is produced in Israel.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

7 2 9: BOYCOTT FOR JUSTICE!<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mahmoud Sarsak is the Palestinian national team soccer player jailed for three years without charges by the Israeli government. He refused an invitation sent by FC Barcelona to attend its Clasico [7 Oct 2012] against Real Madrid. Barcelona wants him there to mute planned protests against the presence of another invitee, former Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. \u201cHis slogan is the gun, whereas mine is football, whose message is love and peace. For this reason I will refuse.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-palestine-israel-gaza-genocide"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21943"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21943\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}