Picture: Iranians in Brazil: Charming Football Hooligans
So World Cup 2014 is over for the Iranian team. They took the flight back to Tehran.
I do not mind, I am not a football fan. I just like to see it when teamwork, technique, and an intelligent strategy are at work, qualities that we are not taught in Iran, as we have not learned to live together in a free country.
I just like to see a match because my fellow European citizens stay in parks, cafés and houses – windows open – to cheer, boo and drink their beer.
I like it when boys and girls with the most extravagant outfits and looks shout till their vocal cords are worn out and flirt with the opposite sex. I like to see women with green, pink, blue hair, their décolletage and bosom lines. I rejoice when after the match the fans, never mind which side, drive their cars with flags, blowing their horns as if they were at a wedding.
These things are unlikely to happen in Iran. On the contrary, football fans, lets call them Football Hooligans, in Iran are closely watched, spied on. Men can cheer and boo with moderation. Women cannot budge. All exuberance must follow the Islamic Morality of the damned Islamic Republic.
In Iran we prefer to bury youngsters alive rather than let them thrive.
Being a football fan in Iran is a political burden. Women must just stay indoors, Islamic scarfs on, shirts buttoned up, and discreetly follow the match while serving tea to others. If they were to go out with their male friends, find a deserted area, uncover their wavy magnificent hair, and open up their shirt collars, wave and boo, they are in deep shit with those bearded men reinforcing the Sharia. This is what happened to folk who unwisely let the world know about their joy on YouTube:
Well, the Bassidjis did not miss them. They recognised some of them, and caught them. They will have nauseating treatment in days to come.
Just Another World
Being an Iranian Football Hooligan is easy enough. Live in the West. Join the crowd in parks and cafés and do as any other Westerner would do. Iranians who can do this are expats. After the game is over they can go home and not be asked to answer an Islamic Judge.
The say: “We are Iranians, and now we want to show the world what we can do.”
And what that may be?
I wish they would show the world what they can do, but not in a Brazilian football stadium. I wish they would show the world that they are capable of devising a bright future for their country, in a political arena. I wish they would protest till the fans back home are released.
The real world is so different. I expect the hooligans to go back home, follow their life’s routine and soon forget the Brazilian parties. Would they have just have a thought for those fans in Iran, who had put their lives at stake to cheer and boo?
Football can unite Iran. But World Cup 2014 was another occasion missed for Iranians to protest firmly against ayatollahs, to find a unity that Iran badly needs to free herself from backward traditions. It was lost, as many others were lost in the last three decades. Each match with the Iranian team was an occasion for negative patriotism, for a hollow “feel good” factor.
Iranian expats felt too good. They enjoy Western freedom, and some still travel to Iran for their holidays. Privileged, they are. They can have the better of two worlds. But they are hooligans.
They are disunited from their fellow countrymen in Iran with whom they do not share the most valuable quality for Iran: freedom from the yoke of ayatollahs and their deleterious Islamic Morality and Sharia.
The best things in the world are shared.
2018 will see another World Cup. The pattern will repeat itself. Ayatollahs will still be in power, perhaps with another Supreme Guide; Khamenei could be dead by then from old age. Since our Parliament is made up of cretins, they will be bickering over some other female underwear, questioning a minster or two on knickers, or perhaps bras. They have just done this, on 24 June 2014, becoming the laughing stock of the international community by debating women’s leggings.
In the meanwhile, madness is raging in the Middle East. Syria’s plight is ongoing but forgotten. Iraq is cut up thanks to some more cretins from regional and international communities. In these tragedies, we Iranians have our share of guilt and shame by our silence and apathy, we support ayatollahs.
Welcome to planet Earth. Welcome to Iran. Welcome to surrealism.
