Taking the knee? No, vacuously jerking it

The England football team ignored the victims of tyranny right in front of them

Iran football team standing in silent protest during Iranian national anthem

There could hardly have been a more graphic illustration of virtue-signalling humbug than the behaviour of the England team at the World Cup opening match in Qatar yesterday.

It wasn’t just the team’s farcical “anti-racist” gesture of “taking the knee” before kick-off in a stadium whose construction involved the death of poverty-stricken immigrant workers. 

It wasn’t just the self-indulgent fuss over whether the England captain would be permitted to display an LGBT rainbow on his armband — a remarkably selective sense of outrage, since it’s not only gay people in Qatar who are deprived of their human rights but women there who are oppressed and dissidents there who are locked up. For heaven’s sake, Qatar is a police state. Shouldn’t all its people be supported as the victims of despotism?

What really grated, however, was that the Iranian team so resoundingly defeated by the England squad was composed of players whose own gesture on the pitch required real courage.

When the Iranian national anthem was played, they refused to sing it and stood instead in silent protest. For that act of conspicuous defiance, they may well face official harassment, arrest and far worse when they return to Iran. 

In the New York Sun, Benny Avni writes that the Iranian team’s fans in the stands booed the anthem, while outside the stadium Iranians chanted: “Death to Khamenei,” Iran's Supreme Leader.

“I looked at the players’ faces and I thought they were grief-stricken,” an Iranian-American author and essayist, Roya Hakakian, told the Sun. “This is such a significant moment because the eyes of the world are on this. It will definitely be welcomed by the people, because they want the world to know. It is more effective than all the CNN coverage of Iran. The players took everybody by surprise.”

Yet the England squad made no acknowledgement of the Iranian team’s courage and emotion. It made no acknowledgement of the repression in Iran under which women are attacked or jailed for not covering their hair, dissidents are tortured and gay people are hanged from cranes. Instead, team members drew attention to their own supposed virtue by taking the knee.

Their narcissism and hypocrisy are all the more jarring in the light of what’s going on in Iran itself.