Bad news for the Iranian regime from Qatar

I’m not one of those geeky soccer fans who claims that soccer explains the world. It doesn’t. Occasionally, though, soccer provides helpful hints about world affairs.

At the 1978 World Cup, an Iranian soccer star, under pressure not to speak ill of the Shah, called him a tyrant. The significance of this description wasn’t its level of accuracy; it was the fact that the player didn’t fear offering it.

At this World Cup, Iran’s team captain Ehsan Hajsafi said he “supports” protesters who have died at the hands of the government, and added "we have to accept that the conditions in our country are not right.”

Star forward Sardar Azmoun also criticized the mullahs’ regime. He declared:
”Long live Iranian women.” The oppression of Iranian women, and the killing of one, sparked the current protests throughout Iran.

The rest of the Iranian team seems to agree with its two star players. According to reports, when the Iranian national anthem was played before the match, none of the team’s players sang it. That’s highly unusual.

In addition, it was reported that the anthem was booed by many members of the large Iranian crowd. Qatar, where the World Cup’s being held, is not a long plane ride from Iran.

I didn’t witness the booing. However, I heard very loud cheering when Azmoun entered the match as a substitute.

It’s no scoop that “conditions in Iran aren’t right” and that Iranian women are oppressed. As in 1978, the news is that Iranian players aren’t afraid to say this.

Tyrannies fall when opponents shed their fear of them. Opponents tend to shed their fear when the soldiers and police officers charged with crushing opponents become conflicted about doing so. That doesn’t seem to have happened much yet in Iran, but there are reports of it occurring in a few instances.

Soccer players don’t enforce the edicts of tyrannical regimes. However, they are often drawn from the same class of people as those who do. And like those who do the enforcing, they typically benefit from special privileges. That privileged status helps keep them in line.

The current Iranian team has not been kept in line. That’s bad news for the regime.

And, of course, it’s far from the only bad news. The BBC collected its recent articles about Iranian protests here. This article describes how protesters set fire to the ancestral home of Ayatollah Khomeini, the fanatic who established the current theocracy.

This report explains why, in the view of the author, the current protests differ from those of the past:

In large street demonstrations, which have been happening in all of Iran's major cities and many small towns, women have burnt their hijabs, often dancing at the same time, while others have cut off their hair. Strikes have been reported in schools, universities and the country’s vital oil sector.

Violent clashes have at times broken out, with protestors torching buildings of the security forces. . . .

What is unique about today’s protests -- much larger than those in 2019 -- is that they have united nearly every section of society. 

Roulla [an activist and reseracher] says that in 2019 poorer sections of society protested fuel price rises, while unrest in 2009 centered n more middle-class issues of vote rigging.

The “simple reason” why there is more unity now, he claims, is that Amini [the young women whose death at the hands of the morality police triggered the protests] was an “ordinary girl”. “She was not from a big city or an activist. She was taken from her family … it's much easier to sympathize with that.”

Something else that sets these protests apart from those in the past is that they show the Islamic Republic has “lost legitimacy among its core supporters”, says Sadr [a human rights lawyer], believing this is due to the “horrific violence” inflicted upon past protestors.

“It's like internal bleeding inside the regime that is getting worse and worse.”

For the first time in recent years, anti-government demonstrations have taken place in more traditional and conservative cities, such as Qom and Mashhad.

I’m not going to predict the imminent fall of the mullah’s regime. This has been predicted too many times before, with no such result. However, it seems that, at a minimum, Iranians have taken another step in the road to overthrowing the government.

On November 29, the U.S. will play Iran at the World Cup. When the two countries met at the 1998 Cup, the match (won by Iran) felt a like a mini-war.

When they meet next week, the encounter will likely have a very different feel, and not just because the Iranian team might well have been eliminated from a place in the final 16 by then.

Is it wishful thinking to suggest that Iranian fans will applaud the U.S. and maybe even sing along with our national anthem? We’ll see.