The soccer player’s Israel boycott

My colleague Karmel Melamed, an Iranian-American Jew who loves writing about any topic with even part of one of those three words in it, has a post over at his blog about an Iranian-born German soccer player who refused last week to play in the European Under-21 Championship in Tel Aviv. I guess he picked up where the British academics left off.

It is not only unsportsmanlike for any player to wage a private boycott against a country including Israel, but especially insulting when a player from Germany of all places with its history of anti-Semitism displays this type of behavior!

Indeed, it seems, as good a punchline as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is to us, some people actually take the guy seriously. (Yeah, I saw those Tehran U students protesting his presence). This also is not the first time an Iranian player has participated in such a boycott. Well, sports in Israel have been through worse.