Iran has banned a weightlifter from sports for life and dissolved a sports committee after the athlete greeted an Israeli counterpart on a podium.
Mostafa Rajaei, a veteran weightlifter, finished second in his category in the 2023 World Master Weightlifting Championships in Poland and stood on a podium with an Iranian flag wrapped around him on Saturday.
On anther step of the podium stood Maksim Svirsky from Israel, who finished third.
The two athletes shook hands and took a picture together, which led to the Iran Weightlifting Federation banning Rajaei from all sports for life due to what it called an “unforgivable” transgression.
Qatar, and by extension of cash money also Al Jazeera, is very anti-Iran.
I’m not seeing any news of this at all in Iranian media, which actually is fairly tabloid and weight lifting is a big thing in Iran. Even if you want to tell yourself the regime has absolute control over information, which isn’t true, they’d still need to provide a cover story due to the high profile nature of it and I don’t see one.
Also Iranian social media is vibrant and also I don’t see anything in Persian but maybe I’m using the wrong search terms?
All I see are the bbc and the telegraph and cnn etc etc etc repeating almost exactly the same story word for word.
It seems like fake news to me. The classic case of one biased journalist writing a story, sending it to AP, and the entire western media just repeating the thing word for word because it’s free news inches and posting propaganda of this nature is oddly enough free in our modern system of journalism.
It seems unlikely to actually be true to me. It seems more likely that it’s being syndicated without any critical enquiry because it agrees with the establishment narrative about Iran.
Even if they did have complete control, I’m pretty sure Iranians want to spread anti Israel sentiment whenever possible, so this ban wouldn’t necessarily be controversial for the government. It would probably be all over the place to encourage more people to do the opposite of the athlete
Yeah that’s a good point. I don’t see Iran denying this if it were true either so radio silence on the topic makes it seem like it was just made up.