Add The New York Post on Google 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.
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 why this matters, you have to understand what the Lion and Sun means to Iranians.
That flag is a 2,500-year-old civilization’s emblem of itself, made official under Iran’s 1906 constitution. To Iranians, the last 47 years of theocratic rule do not define them.
These years are an interruption. A blip. A hostage situation in a civilization that has outlived empires.
The Lion and Sun is what Iranians look to when they remember themselves. The Islamic Republic’s flag, designed in 1980, is what was forced on them by a regime that hangs women from cranes for showing their hair, executes teenagers in mass batches, and exports terror from Beirut to Buenos Aires.
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Iranians look to the old flag as more than a national treasure or a memory of a better time. They look to it as everything that stands against the regime that replaced it.
The Lion and Sun represents freedom. Hope. A future. A celebrated past.
It represents acceptance, unity, an Iran for all Iranians — not just the ones who pass the regime’s loyalty tests.
It represents music, culture, patriotism, and yes, sport — soccer above all, the game Iranian toddlers begin playing in the streets the moment they learn to walk.
That is what the Lion and Sun represents. The current flag? It represents the very opposite of every one of those things.
And now FIFA wants to export the regime’s ideology, in stadiums in Los Angeles, Dallas and the Bay Area. Never mind the First Amendment. The mullahs will exert their will on American soil.
For Iranian Americans, this is personal. Many of us fled that regime. Many of us lost family to it. Many of us have spent decades raising children who know what the Lion and Sun means — that there was, and will again be, an Iran beyond the mullahs.
To tell us we cannot wave our own flag, in our own country, at a tournament America is hosting, is to betray us again.
FIFA likes to lecture the world about keeping politics out of football. Banning the Lion and Sun isn’t keeping politics out. It is taking the regime’s side in the most consequential political fight of our generation — between a 2,500-year-old civilization and the 47-year-old theocracy holding it hostage.
President Trump should make clear that no entity operating on American soil — least of all one touting the demands of a hostile foreign regime — will confiscate the flags of American citizens.
The mullahs took our country. They will not take our flag.
Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.
