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FIFA’s Iran flag ban is an insult to America — and gift to the mullahs

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FIFA is poised to prohibit the “Lion and Sun” flag — the historic pre-1979 flag of Iran — from World Cup stadiums in the US this summer, after the Islamic Republic’s football federation issued a list of 10 demands as the price of its team’s participation.

One of those demands, from federation chief Mehdi Taj, was that “no flag other than the Islamic Republic’s flag” be permitted in stadiums where Iran plays.

FIFA’s answer wasn’t to send the regime packing. It was to point to its stadium code banning “political or discriminatory materials” — a rule that, conveniently applied, gives the mullahs exactly what they asked for.

Let me translate. The world’s most prominent sporting body is preparing to enforce, on American soil, the censorship preferences of one of the world’s worst regimes.

A flag flown by Iranian Americans, by dissidents, by the women and men inside Iran tearing down the regime’s banners and raising the Lion and Sun in their place — that flag, in FIFA’s telling, is too “political” to be seen at a soccer match.

The flag of the theocracy that hangs its own citizens? That one is fine.

So is the Palestinian flag, by the way.

The Palestinian team doesn’t even have a state and didn’t qualify for the World Cup. But it’s a member of FIFA, so Palestinians can wave their flag. Iranians who want freedom can’t wave theirs.

To understand........

© New York Post