Skip to content
  • Image
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Podcasts
  • Email
  • Subscribe to Ray’s Columns
  • Contact
The Arab Daily News

The Arab Daily News

Original news, features, opinions from Chicago to Jerusalem

  • About
    • About
    • Our Writers
    • Subscribe to Ray’s Columns
    • Book Store
    • Contact
    • Submit Book Reviews, Press Releases
    • Advertise
    • Privacy Corrections Policy
    • Profile on Ray Hanania
    • Submit Press Release
  • Features
    • Food
    • Book Review
    • Humor
    • Movies
    • Travel
  • Arab Stores Targeted
  • Arab Community Network Page
    • Arab Community Network Page
    • Arab Heritage America resources
    • Directory
      • Groups & Organizations
      • Mosques, Churches
      • Restaurants
      • 2008 & 2014 Arab Media Directories
    • National Arab Heritage Month
    • Video: Chicago Arab History
    • Video: Photo Array of Chicago Arabs
    • Overview of Arabs in America
    • Hanania standup comedy
    • Arabs on the Titanic
    • Obituaries
  • Podcasts
    • Ray Hanania on Politics Podcast
    • Arab News Ray Hanania Radio
    • Arab Radio Podcast intro
    • Radio Baladi Detroit
  • Hanania on Tiktok
  • Subscribe to Ray’s Columns
  • Toggle search form
  • UN Special Committee on Israeli practices in occupied territories warns of a second Nakba  Arab World
  • Arab American community liaison Hassan Nijem, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas and Bolingbrook Mayor Mary Basta at the Arab American Heritage Month event hosted by Pappas’s office.
    Pappas honors Arab American business and community leaders for Heritage Month Activism
  • 04-28-25 Pappas Arab Heritage Month
    Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recognizes Arab American Heritage Month by honoring business and community leaders American Arabs
  • Stuffed Grape Leaves. Photo courtesy of Ray Hanania
    A recipe on how to make Stuffed Grape Leaves with lamb, ox tail and rice American Arabs
  • Andrew Boutros, interim US Attorney Northern District of Illinois. Photo courtesy of the US Attorney's Office
    Andrew S. Boutros Takes Oath of Office as United States Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois American Arabs
  • Israeli massacres of Palestinian civilians March 18 2025
    Palestinians demand investigation of Israeli war crimes in Gaza Strip Arab World
  • Illinois Muslim Action Day April 9 2025
    Illinois Muslim Action Day Policies at April 9 Statehouse News Conference American Arabs
  • Investigation demanded in March 23 massacre of 15 first responders by Israel's military in Rafah
    Investigation demanded into Israel slaughter of First Responder in Rafah on March 23, 2025 Arab World
  • More than a dozen candidates running for various local offices in the Chicagoland suburbs attended an Ifatr dinner Thursday, March 13, 2025 hosted by the Arab American Chamber of Commerce at the Jerusalem Banquet Hall in Bridgeview.
    Candidates promise fairness and engagement at Arab Chamber Iftar event March 13 Activism
  • Orland Fire Protection District, Fiscal Voices, receive endorsement of the Arab American Democracy Coaliton
    Independent candidates for Orland Fire receive Arab and Muslim American endorsement Activism
  • Partial Image from a video produced by the PASC called "Citizens Against Insider Politics". The video slandered Arabs and Muslims in Orland Park as being supporters of terrorism. The PAC receivced a major donation fromt he founder of Pete's Fresh Market which operate stores in two heavily populated Arab and Muslim communities, Bridgeview and Orland Park.
    CAIR-Chicago Denounces Growing Islamophobia in Southwest Suburbs, Calls for Hate Crime Investigation Activism
  • The Arab American Chamber of Commerce of Chicagoland and the Palestine Club are hosting a "Candidate's Iftar" on Thursday, March 13 beginning at 5:30 PM at Jerusalem Banquets, 8314 S. Harlem Avenue.
    Arab Chamber and Palestine Club host Candidate Iftar March 13 in Bridgeview Activism
  • Television set and remote. Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
    MBC GROUP unveils MBCNOW, its brand-new groundbreaking entertainment service aggregator American Arabs
  • Mike Ghouse
    Celebration of 500th Interfaith Marriage Ceremony American Arabs
  • Orland Park activist Yousif Zegar addresses the Orland Park Village Board meeting on Feb. 5, 2024.
    All United launches to empower local community and drive political change American Arabs

Militant soccer fans are on a roll across Eurasia

Posted on September 13, 2015September 13, 2015 By James Dorsey No Comments on Militant soccer fans are on a roll across Eurasia
SHARE ...
          
 
  

  • Tweet

By James M. Dorsey

Militant soccer fans are on a roll in the Middle East, Europe and Southeast Asia. Fans in Turkey and Egypt have defeated legal efforts to criminalize them as terrorists while Malaysian ultras are tackling corruption in and mismanagement of their country’s soccer association. In Germany, the pitch anticipated the government’s shift in policy towards the wave of refugees sweeping Europe with fans expressing support a week before the country opened the floodgates.

Although these incidents were unrelated incidents and occurred in widely different political and social environments, they share a number of things in common: they all focussed on aspects of social justice, repression, corruption and compassion towards the needy.

The incidents further highlighted the soccer pitch’s significance as an early indicator of societal distrust in government and institutions. That distrust was this weekend similarly expressed in the electoral victory of controversial leftist Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the British Labour Party. Mr. Corbyn’s success constituted a rejection of the dominance of corporate politics.

English: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip E...
English: Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Third Global Forum of the UN Alliance of Civilizations in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the latest development, Turkish prosecutors advised an Istanbul court to drop all charges against 35 members of Carsi, the militant support group of storied club Besiktas JK who had been charged in a nine month-old, ill-documented, political showcase trial of seeking to topple the government of then Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and belonging to a terrorist organization, offences that could have put them for life behind bars.

Carsi, one of Turkey’s largest, if not its largest, fan group has long campaigned for social justice related issues, and played in 2013 a key role in the biggest anti-government protests since Mr. Erdogan’s rise to power in 2003.

The prosecutors’ turnaround followed the acquittal earlier of this year of 26 members of Taksim Solidarity, an umbrella group that was among the leaders of the protests on Istanbul’s iconic Taksim Square. It also came at a moment that Mr. Erdogan has been cracking down on his critics, including critical media, in the run-up to November 1 parliamentary elections called after his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) failed to win in June the majority it needed to form a one-party government.

While Mr. Erdogan’s autocratic tendencies stop far short of the brutality that Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al Sisi employs, Turkish and Egyptian efforts to stymie militant soccer fans that in both countries have often emerged as a backbone of popular protest often develop in step. Like in Turkey, Egyptian courts were employed in unsuccessful attempts to criminalize militant fans who had played a key role in the popular revolt that in 2011 toppled President Hosni Mubarak and most subsequent anti-government protests.

Militant Egyptian fans forced the interior ministry earlier this month to partially lift the long-standing ban on spectators attending soccer matches in a bid to prevent the pitch from re-emerging as a platform for dissent. The lifting was widely seen as a potential signal that the country’s military-backed regime recognized that its brutal choking off of all public space was backfiring and threatened to fuel radicalization.

Like in Turkey, the Egyptian militant soccer fans scored their tactical victory in advance of parliamentary elections that in Egypt will have no veneer of being free and fair unlike the Turkish ones even taking into account Mr. Erdogan’s undemocratic measures against his opponents.

In Egypt, moreover Mr. Al Sisi this weekend appeared to be pouring salt on open wounds after first arresting his agriculture ministers on charges of corruption and then appointing a new prime minister, Sharif Ismail, whose image is tarnished by allegations of association with corruption.

Mortada Mansour, the controversial larger-than-life president of crowned Cairo club Al Zamalek SC, who was the main driver behind the failed efforts to outlaw the ultras, was quick to criticize Mr. Al Sisi’s appointment of Mr. Ismail, warning him on television not to become another Mubarak. Mr. Mansour had earlier accused Mr. Ismail of nepotism following a dispute over a player with ENPPI SC, a club controlled by state-owned company Engineering for the Petroleum and Process Industries (ENPPI) with whom Mr. Ismail has long been associated.

Corruption and mismanagement was also at the root of the breaking up by Malaysian ultras of a Malaysia-Saudi Arabia World Cup qualifier in an effort to force the resignation of Football Association of Malaysia (FAM) president Sultan Ahmad Shah after 30 years in office. Eleven fans were arrested in connection with the incident.

Malaysian soccer like Malaysian politics itself has long been dogged by accusations of corruption. The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Agency detained late last year 16 players, including nine from the Police Football Association on suspicion of match fixing. Malaysia has in recent months been rocked by charges that $700 million held by beleaguered prime minister Najib Razak involved illicit payments.

“Sorry players. Sorry Malaysians. Sorry Saudi Arabians. But it had to be done,” the group, Ultras Malaya, said on Twitter. “Our protests have been going on for three years. We have gone through all the official channels… We do not care what others think,” a leader of the group identified as Freddie Been was quoted as telling local media. “We had to hit FAM where it hurts the most. We had to humiliate FAM to get the message across,” added Al Fadli Awaludin, a founder of Ultras Malaya.

Responding to charges by Youth and Sports Minister Khairy Jamaluddin that the ultras had embarrassed Malaysia, Mr. Been said: “I should ask him, when we were (recently) beaten 10-0 to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), did he not feel embarrassed?”

Countering repression and corruption were at the core of Middle Eastern and Malaysian fan activism for social justice. German and British fans focused on making compassion the yardstick of European policy towards the mass of people fleeing wars in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, many of which Western powers either ignited or exasperated.

Fans displayed banners during various German Bundesliga matches in support of Europe’s responsibility towards the refugees days before the image went viral of Aylan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Kurdish boy whose body washed ashore on a Turkish beach after the boat in which he and his family were trying to reach Europe capsized. “Welcome Refugees,” many of the banners read. Similar banners appeared during English Premier League games.

In response to Guardian columnist Marina Hyde’s assertion that refugee crisis could give meaning to the artificial construct of a football family, fans in Britain launched a fund-raising campaign, Bayern Munich reserved $1 million for efforts to aid refugees, and clubs like Scotland’s Celtic, Real Madrid and FC Porto promised to play their part. “If such a thing (like a football family) can ever be said to exist, then this issue gripping Europe should be among the very closest to its heart,” Ms. Hyde wrote.

Many fans and some clubs would argue that their proactive welcoming of refugees long preceded Ms. Hyde’s column or the recent adoption of more welcoming policies by the EU and West European governments.

Nonetheless, the response to Ms. Hyde’s clarion call as well as fan protests in the Middle East and Southeast Asia illustrate the importance segments of the football family attribute to social justice as well as mounting popular distrust of institutions. Said columnist Rory Smith on ESPN FC: “While football and politics do not mix, football and social responsibility certainly do.”

Mr. Smith noted that knockoff jerseys of European clubs featured in virtually every picture of refugees arriving in or trudging through southern Europe even if soccer was not the reason for the refugees’ flight to the continent.

“Football has traded on its universality for long enough. It has grown fat and rich on television contracts and foreign tours. It has said we are all part of one family, one set of families. And that means it has a duty to respond now, to show that this is not a one-way street, to show that it meant what it said. That is the point, surely, of being a family: that you are there for your family when it needs you, Mr. Smith wrote.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.

newswire info
  • About
  • Latest Posts
James Dorsey
Follow Me
James Dorsey
James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies as Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, co-director of the Institute of Fan Culture of the University of Würzburg and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer, and a forthcoming book with the same title.
James Dorsey
Follow Me
Latest posts by James Dorsey (see all)
  • Soccer highlights domestic drivers in Saudi-Iranian dispute - January 4, 2016
  • Soccer: Iranian moderates and hardliner lock horns on the pitch - December 29, 2015
  • Trade unions test Qatari sincerity with demands for labour reform - December 20, 2015

  • Tweet

SHARE ...
          
 
  
 
          
 
 Tweet 
Arab World, Bloggers, Commentary, Sports Tags:sports, Turkey

Post navigation

Previous Post: The Women in Hebron
Next Post: Algiers’ Scoop du Jour

Related Posts

  • Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Photo courtesy of WIkipedia
    Democracy reinforced under Turkey’s Erdogan Arab World
  • President Trump lands in Saudi Arabia for red carpet welcome in the Arab World's leading nation on Saturday May 20, 2017. Photo courtesy of the White House
    Trump signs $110 billion arms deal with Saudis Arab World
  • USS Liberty Revisionism: It Started With a Lie Bloggers
  • Israel’s Nuclear Weapons, Senator Schumer The Fourth Estate and Vanunu Mordechai #Vanunu American Arabs
  • Recipe: Arabian lamb, egg skillet for breakfast American Arabs
  • Arab governments investing heavily in Satellite TV News Arab World

More Related Articles

Threats against Bridgeview Mosque investigated (Updated) American Arabs
Muharram 2014; a catalyst for change for Muslims. Arab World
Photos: Children, civilians continue to suffer in Gaza Arab World
The Arab Street The Arab Daily News radio show and audio podcast at www.TheArabStreet.com The Arab Street Radio: Ghassan Khatib on future of Israel-Palestine peace Arab World
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, left, United Arab Emirates Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan, and Bahrain Foreign Minister Khalid bin Ahmed Al Khalifa stand on the Blue Room Balcony during the Abraham Accords signing ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House, Tuesday, Sept. 15, 2020, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon courtesy of the Arab News Newspaper Analysis of the Abraham Accords, UAE, Bahrain and Israel American Arabs
Faisal Abbas Book Anecdotes Book Review: Arab author shares his anecdotes living in the United Kingdom Arab News

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Ray Hanania's 4 times a week columns at https://RayHanania.com at Substack

Enter Your Email to Subscribe to Ray Hanania’s Columns

  • OPINION COLUMNS
  • Photo courtesy of Journalist Abdennour Toumi
    France: Political Compromise vs Political Instability
    August 28, 2024
  • Zakia Restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia
    Arabs eat Middle East food like they are making love
    June 27, 2024
  • Zwar lamb kabob and kufta with white and yellow rice
    Zwar ranked the Best Middle East restaurant in Chicagoland suburbs
    June 8, 2024
  • Pictured: Rahm Emanuel, Afghan activist Salman Aftab who was co-chair of the Iftar dinner, and several non-Arab Muslim leaders. Also pictured is Ald. Joe Moore. Photo courtesy of Ray Hanania for Arab News
    Comprehensive look at the failings of former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel
    January 18, 2024
  • NEWSWIRE
  • Arab American community liaison Hassan Nijem, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas and Bolingbrook Mayor Mary Basta at the Arab American Heritage Month event hosted by Pappas’s office.
    Pappas honors Arab American business and community leaders for Heritage Month
    April 29, 2025
  • 04-28-25 Pappas Arab Heritage Month
    Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas recognizes Arab American Heritage Month by honoring business and community leaders
    April 27, 2025
  • Mike Ghouse
    Celebration of 500th Interfaith Marriage Ceremony
    February 14, 2025
  • Arab American Democracy Coalition logo 2025
    AADC to host annual candidates’ Forum & Brunch Sunday at Nikos in Bridgeview
    February 11, 2025

Creative Commons License
All work on this website is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Do not edit original work. Give credit to the original source.

  • NEWS
  • UN Special Committee on Israeli practices in occupied territories warns of a second Nakba 
    May 9, 2025
  • Arab American community liaison Hassan Nijem, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas and Bolingbrook Mayor Mary Basta at the Arab American Heritage Month event hosted by Pappas’s office.
    Pappas honors Arab American business and community leaders for Heritage Month
    April 29, 2025
  • BOOK REVIEWS
  • Faisal Abbas Book Anecdotes
    Book Review: Arab author shares his anecdotes living in the United Kingdom
    October 22, 2024
  • Columnist Ray Hanania at the ADC Convention in Dearborn with the author Susan Abulhawa
    Book Review: Mornings in Jenin bySusan Abulhawa
    September 14, 2024
  • ENTERTAINMENT
  • Television set and remote. Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash
    MBC GROUP unveils MBCNOW, its brand-new groundbreaking entertainment service aggregator
    February 24, 2025
  • ArabCon 2024 Gala Program features Dr. Cornel West, Macklemore, and more
    September 6, 2024
  • New-iTunes-1400-x-1400-The-Ray-Hanania-Show-Podcast-Icon-300-x-300.jpg
  • powerpr300x300ad.jpg
  • Podcast-iTunes-Logo-Chi-City-Hall-1985.jpg
  • terroristbookcover-300-x-300.jpg
  • The-Kings-Pawn-Book-300-x-300.png
Arab News Newspaper Logo
Read the Arab News, the leading English language newspaper in the MIddle East

Follow Ray Hanania at
Twitter
Facebook
TitkTok
BlueSky
RayHanania Columns

Click here to get information on The Ray Hanania Radio Show and its podcasts

Copyright © 2025 The Arab Daily News.

Powered by PressBook Premium theme