Malignant Turks refuse to play Israeli national anthem for Israeli chess tournament winner, who stands defiantDefiant and victorious (JW)
The following letter was sent to FIDE, President Kirsan Ilumzhinov and Vice President Israel Gelfer.Dear Mr. President,
I write to you with great concern following what seems as a serious incident that occurred .Today during the closing ceremony of the world junior championships held in Turkey. Happily our girl junior player, Marcel Efroymsky, has won the world title and the gold medal. As customed in such events, the delegations prepared to stand and salute the national anthem of the winner's country. Astonishingly and without any warning, the organizers decided to cancel the playing of the winners anthem. The Turkish organization has offered a ridiculous explanation that they do not have the time to spend on such event.
This excuse is absurd in light of the same venue hosting this event two years ago where all winner anthems were played! In there actions, the organizers demonstrated disrespect to the junior winners, their federation and their countries. As chairman of the Israeli Chess Federation, I herby urge you to investigate this incident. I must say that this kind of boycott (if such occurred) strikes as a another example of how politics interferes with chess. I call you as president of the FIDE, for which the tournament carried your flag, to investigate this issue and if the information appeared to be accurate, then to denounce this disrespectful conduct if the information.
My feeling is, that such events hurt chess in general and send the wrong message the children who dream to become chess champions taking pride in representing their countries.
Yours truly,
Aviv Bushinsky
Chairman of the Israeli Chess Federation
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- The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009
- Article history
As every middlebrow with a newspaper column or Radio 4 slot to fill agrees, a vulgar "new atheism" is sweeping Britain. The readers of Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman and
I could waste your time by pointing out that "new atheists" are not so different from old atheists – we still don't believe in God, for instance – and add that the charge of moral equivalence would be easier to substantiate if atheists planted bombs on the underground. But space is short and the depressing truth about "new atheists" no one dwells on is that if they exist outside the imaginations of religious writers, they are never there when you need them. For if we had a vibrant atheist or secularist movement in Britain, it would now be tearing into this government for once again trying to ride the Islamist tiger.
Last Sunday,
As the week wore on, it became clear what type of "faith communities" Labour wanted to put at the centre of its "progressive society". Denham is forcing out of his department Azhar Ali, an adviser from the heart of the
After Daud Abdullah, the deputy
That brief moment of principled politics is over. There's talk of the government giving the MCB's Sir Iqbal "death perhaps is a bit too easy for
The fix is in and Islamists are all over
Astute outsiders look at people who were on the 20th-century left and notice that they have gone from calling themselves "socialists" to "
Over at the Department for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls is as keen on appeasing the churches as Denham is on appeasing radical Islam. Last week, the National Secular Society (of which I am a patron) described how Labour allowed faith schools to reject applications from non-religious teachers solely on the grounds that they doubted the presence of supernatural beings or worshipped the wrong supernatural being. The rebuttal Balls's department issued was so vituperative and inaccurate that civil servants had to take the virtually unheard-of step of withdrawing it and thus tacitly acknowledge the truth of the secularists' claim that the only people New Labour allowed employers to discriminate against were atheists and sceptics.
You don't need to be a political tactician to understand Labour's dog-whistle politics. Balls is playing both sides by alleging that the Tories would bring creationism to the classroom while doing nothing to restrict religious control of schools. At the Department for Communities, I am told that real power does not rest with the ineffective John Denham, but
No minister, though, imagines that they will pay a political price as hundreds of thousands of "new atheists" walk away in disgust. Which is not to say that a price will not be paid, just that it will come in a coinage no Observer reader should want to accept. Communalist politics do not always generate a liberal backlash; more often, communalism merely produces heightened communal tension.
Sufis are now promising to tell Dewsbury Muslims not to vote for Malik, which is no more than he deserves. More seriously, a revival of the left's affair with Islamism can only help the BNP by convincing the white working class that their rulers hypocritically denounce racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia when they come from the followers of Nick Griffin, but not when they come from the friends of Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
It is a dismal way to imagine Britain's longest period of left-wing rule ending, but perhaps it will take the BNP winning a parliamentary contest or so splitting the Labour vote that the Tories come through the middle in "safe" seats for the party to realise you cannot be a fairweather anti-fascist or part-time leftist without your "progressive society" turning to dust.





