‘Genocide Olympics’: Israeli soccer team plays in Paris as IDF bombs school in Gaza

Dave Zirin

August 1, 2024

On the same day that Israeli forces bombed a girls’ school in central Gaza, killing at least 30 people and injuring over 100, Israel’s soccer team was allowed to compete without sanctions at the 2024 Paris Olympics. Even though Paraguay defeated Israel 4-2, TRNN’s Dave Zirin reports that “Israel actually won this, because they were allowed to play at all.” In this on-the-ground report from Paris, Zirin covers the protests and politics surrounding Saturday’s soccer match.

 

Fans with Flag of Palestine open a banner written 'Genocide Olympics' during the Men's group D match between Israel and Paraguay during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, France on July 27, 2024. Photo by Mustafa Yalcin/Anadolu via Getty Images

Dave Zirin:

Hey, this is Dave Zirin from Edge of Sports TV, only on the Real News Network. I’m here standing outside, Parc des Princes Stadium here in Paris, where the Israeli soccer team is about to take on Paraguay. Now, why am I here? Because the question about Israeli athletes and them having the permission to play in these games is one of the hot-button issues in Paris right now, and frankly around the world, particularly on this day of all days where an Israeli airstrike killed 30 people sheltering in a school in Gaza. So we’re wondering, are there going to be protests here? You hear some noise in the background. What are those protests going to look like? We’re going to find out right here at the stadium. Maybe there’ll be nothing. Maybe there’ll be something. But I’m excited to find out, because the resistance at these Olympics are the politics they do not want to talk about.

Just a few things about the mood outside the stadium. You do see some folks in Israeli flags. I’m not seeing yet Palestinian flags, but Paraguay has shown up in a big way. So that’s something, and we’re going to keep recording and keep finding out what’s happening as Israel meets Paraguay at a contest where a lot of people think Israel has no place on the field.

The security outside the Israel-Paraguay game, it was like nothing you can imagine and nothing I’ve ever experienced before a sporting event. Incredible amount of police, your body was checked twice, machine guns everywhere, and yet despite all of that, look at this man, in a wheelchair, with a Palestinian flag, somehow got it into the arena. I got to tell you, if he was able to do all that, it’s actually humbling to think about what he went through. Humbling to think about how important it was for him to make a statement of dissent against Israel’s presence.

Okay, the match is over. Paraguay won four to two over Israel, but that’s not the story here. Because Israel in a way, actually won this because they were able to play at all, and that’s a problem. Here’s the problem at play. Look, Israel should not be in these games at all because of what’s called sportswashing. Right now, Israel is acting like a pariah nation. It is bombing Gaza. It is bombing Rafah, and yet they are allowed to come to these games and be sports washed and accepted as a legitimate part of the international sports community and the international community. And that’s the problem.

A huge number of Israeli players are members of the Israeli Armed Forces, and yet here they are playing. Meanwhile, Russia was sanctioned because many of their players were on the Russian Armed Forces. The hypocrisy is blaring, and yet their Israel was. Their national anthem played, a whole stadium of people stood up and paid respect. There were Israeli flags everywhere. And this is the problem, and that is exactly why we need to be vigilant about saying that Israel has no place in international sports competition as long as it is acting like a settler colonial estate. For Edge of Sports TV, I’m Dave Zirin.

 

More Dead Children.More BBC ‘News’ Channeling Israeli Propaganda as Its Own

Jonathan Cook

BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.

The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.

I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).

It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbors might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defense.

The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.

Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organization that targets and murders children playing soccer.”

Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.

Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.

Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.

So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organization than Hizbullah?

Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.

Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.

(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)

The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”

So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.

A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.

Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.