US Correspondent Logan Church reports from Los Angeles ahead of New Zealand\u2019s first FIFA match, where local Iranians told him they don\u2019t want this game happening. <\/p>\n
This FIFA tournament has been plagued by international politics and war, and New Zealand\u2019s first match will be the epicentre of it. <\/p>\n
The day before both the All Whites and Iran National Football Team arrived in LA, I met with Nasser Sharif, the President of the California Society for Democracy in Iran. <\/p>\n
Why does such a society exist in Los Angeles, of all places? <\/p>\n
Well, according to Pew Research, there are about 750,000 Iranians in the US, and a third of them live in the wider LA region. <\/p>\n
He told me his ultimate goal is to try to inspire regime change inside Iran \u2013 and for Iranians to be the ones that did it, not American bombs. He left the country four decades ago. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was a first-year student in Tehran, but I had to flee Iran due to the government persecution,\u201d he told me. <\/p>\n
After fleeing, and moving through other countries, such as Turkey, he ended up in Los Angeles. <\/p>\n
His group focus on spreading stories of people inside Iran whose voices are crushed by the regime. When they learnt Iran was going to participate in this year\u2019s FIFA World Cup, they immediately wrote to the organisation calling for that decision to be reversed. <\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t receive a response. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Iran regime shouldn’t be involved in this world cup,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Iranian regime is terrorising its own people \u2013 executing athletes. The FIFA, if they believe in their own standards, they should give a red card to Iran’s football federation because again many athletes are in jail.\u201d <\/p>\n
Demonstrators killed<\/p>\n
Earlier this year human rights groups said tens of thousands of Iranians were killed by the government during a surge of anti-regime protests. <\/p>\n
I asked Nasser what message Iran\u2019s inclusion sent. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt sends the wrong the message to the international [community] as well as the Iranian people. Just during the last uprising 40,000* people were killed, and many of them were athletes,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cI love football, I play football, I watch football, but there are more important issues that need to be addressed.\u201d <\/p>\n
He said FIFA had already set a precedent for banning countries \u2013 noting the exclusion of South Africa first in 1961 due to its apartheid policies. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Iranian regime is much worse, and FIFA hasn’t done anything,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cOur community and many other communities around the USA feel that this is our obligation to go out and share the story. This is not normal.\u201d <\/p>\n
Having spent some time with the All Whites already in the USA, publicly it\u2019s all about the football. But behind the scenes, there will be concerns that there are large groups of people in LA that don\u2019t want their opening match to happen. <\/p>\n
The US government, which has been waging its own, highly controversial and unpopular war against Iran, only granted visas to the travelling players recently and refused entry to several support staff, citing concerns about terrorism. <\/p>\n
Playing politics with sport<\/p>\n
Iran rejected this, accusing America of playing politics with sport, and that Iran\u2019s participating in this tournament demonstrated its desire for peace. It was a sentiment expressed by the Iran coach Amir Ghalenoei at his press conference I attended today. <\/p>\n
\u201cCertainly, our plan was to arrive in the United States or Mexico two weeks before the games because of the 10-hour time difference, and every hour requires a day to adjust. Because of that, we might incur some losses but thank God our players are determined to show their best quality in the first game,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe are here to play and represent the great nation of Iran, both at home and abroad. Our sole focus is on football and on making the people of Iran happy. We are not political \u2013 after all, that\u2019s FIFA\u2019s very motto. Football is separate from politics.\u201d <\/p>\n
With large protests expected, security will be tight, as LA County Sheriff Robert Luna told Fox News. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have two games scheduled \u2013 at least \u2013 here with Iran. Because of all the world events, the war in the Middle East, for every game with Iran there is a little bit of a different plan that is unique to that event.\u201d <\/p>\n
In a world \u2013 and tournament \u2013 full of unknowns, what is certain is that this football match will be unique. <\/p>\n
* Due to the Iranian government\u2019s control of the media and internet, it is difficult to confirm the number of deaths during this year’s protests. Estimates range from 6000 dead to 40,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"US Correspondent Logan Church reports from Los Angeles ahead of New Zealand\u2019s first FIFA match, where local Iranians…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478300,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2966,5107,111,139,64,69,213,66],"class_list":["post-478299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-fifa-world-cup","tag-middle-east","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-sports","tag-us-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478299\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}