Source: Politics<\/p>\n
LOS ANGELES \u2014 Iran’s players arrived back in the United States yesterday to play Belgium. For supporters of Team Melli, a cat-and-mouse game with FIFA over political expression continues. <\/p>\n
Soccer’s global governing body has included Iran’s pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag \u2014 a favorite symbol of those protesting the r\u00e9gime in Tehran \u2014 on its list of “materials, including but not limited to banners, flags, fliers, apparel and other paraphernalia, that are of a political, offensive and\/or discriminatory nature” banned under its stadium code of conduct.<\/p>\n
A Los Angeles County Superior Court court judge upheld the ban last week<\/a> after a challenge from the Southern California-based Institute for Voice of Liberty, which argued that FIFA was targeting \u201cprotected symbolic and political speech\u201d in violation of California law. <\/p>\n Actually enforcing the ban against a flood of fans entering the stadium with the emblem on a wide variety of paper and cloth goods has been tougher.<\/p>\n As Iran\u2019s players came out to examine the field about 90 minutes before kickoff of their first match, on Monday night against New Zealand, a stadium official approached a 26-year-old Orange County woman who was holding the flag.<\/p>\n Under FIFA\u2019s rules, he told her, she could wear the Lion and Sun but not \u201cdisplay\u201d it. He lowered his voice to share a loophole: If she wrapped herself in the flag, it would become an item of clothing, exempting it from FIFA\u2019s ban.<\/p>\n \u201cIf it\u2019s not supposed to be political, why can you have the post-revolutionary flag and not the pre-revolutionary flag?\u201d the woman remarked after. \u201cAnd why isn\u2019t like anyone else\u2019s flag banned, like the Venezuelan flag, or whatever?\u201d<\/p>\n