„Pelham ends his article with an extraordinarily propagandistic and simply fantastical moral inversion – informing readers that it is the Israelis – and not the Egyptians – who should be on the defensive about racism.
‚The Middle East is not unique. Politics and the Olympics have gone hand-in-hand for a century. After the first world war, the IOC banned the losing axis of Germany, Austria and Turkey, and barred Germany and Japan again after the Second World War. America and its allies (including Israel) boycotted the Moscow Olympics in 1980 after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. South Africa too was kept out from 1964 to 1988 on account of its apartheid white-supremacist rule. As Israel builds higher barriers between Jews and Palestinians in areas it occupies, the boycotters find the South Africa analogy particularly apt.‘
Of course, ‚apartheid‘ has absolutely nothing to do with ‚higher‘ security barriers between two separate national communities. It involves a legally codified system of racial segregation within a country – a dynamic completely absent from the progressive, multi-ethnic democracy of Israel. Within this explicit lie, however, lays a much bigger implicit lie. Pelham – by citing examples of other historical boycotts – seems to be suggesting that the decision by Arab athletes to ‘boycott’ Israeli athletes can at least arguably be seen as a justifiable moral stance against an intrinsically racist country. The historical ‚context‘ provided by the Economist journalist is not an Arab world which can’t let go of intellectually crippling medieval antisemitic calumnies, but of Jews allegedly guilty of racism and supremacism.“
(Bericht auf UK Media Watch: „Economist twists story about Egyptian racism into lie about Israeli ‚apartheid‘“)
