On May 1st the BBC Sport website published a filmed report titled “Infantino attempts to orchestrate Israel-Palestine handshake”, the synopsis to which states:
“Fifa president Gianni Infantino tries to convince Palestinian and Israeli representatives to shake hands at the Fifa Congress in Vancouver.”
Roughly half of that unnarrated and edited video shows Infantino speaking from a podium. The rest of it shows him engaged in unheard conversation with one of the two unnamed people standing on the stage, who has a keffiyeh draped around his shoulders.
BBC audiences are not told that the man wearing the political symbol at a FIFA conference is the president of the Palestine Football Association, Fatah’s Jibril Rajoub, who is also the head of the PLO Supreme Council for Youth and Sports and the Palestine Olympic Committee. No mention is made of the fact that he was sanctioned by FIFA itself in 2018 for inciting hatred and violence.
Neither are they informed that the other man on the stage is the Israel Football Association’s vice president, Basem Suliman, who is one of several Arab Israeli members of its management.
Notably BBC audiences are not told that the party that refused the “Israel-Palestine handshake” that is the topic of BBC Sport’s report was – according to the Palestine Football Association itself – Rajoub.
The fact that both BBC Sport and the BBC in general have in the past provided amplification for Rajoub’s longstanding exploitation of sport as a means of delegitimising Israel for political ends makes it all the more curious that BBC Sport failed to identify him in this latest report.
Instead, BBC Sport chose to promote the false notion that Infantino failed “to convince” both representatives “to shake hands” rather than telling the real story of a Palestinian representative who refused to acknowledge his Israeli counterpart.
I thought political symbols, both worn or carried, were not allowed by FIFA. They only seem to enforce this rule quite arbitrarily. At an event such as this, and on a main stage where they knew that journalists would be scrutinising, could no one at FIFA muster the strength to inform and enforce the rule? Obviously not.