With one side of its mouth the UAE boasts about its sophisticated modernization, its pretty festivals, its colossal buildings, its millionaires, even, supposedly, its tolerance.
What mumbles out of the other side of the UAE's mouth is rank bigotry.
In mid-February 2009, the UAE hosted the annual Dubai Tennis Championships--the Women's Open from the 15th to the 21st, the Men's Open from the 23rd to the 28th. The $2 million tournament is one of the top championships on the men's and women's circuit. The Women's Open features all but one of the top-10 players (the tenth is injured).
One of the players who'd qualified for the women's draw is Shahar Peer, ranked 48th at the time of the tournament. Just before the Dubai Championships she made it to the semi-final of Thaliand's Pattaya Open. In 2007, when she was ranked 17th, she made it to the quarterfinals of the US Open and the Australian Open, where she almost upset Serena Williams (Peer lost in the third set, 8-6). But as far as the UAE is concerned, there's one problem with Peer: She's Israeli. She was denied a visa. She could not participate in the Dubai Open, even though she qualified.
The United Arab Emirates, like all Arab countries but Qatar and Egypt, has no diplomatic relations with Israel. (In February 2009 Qatar severed what low-level trade relations it had with Israel in protest over the Gaza war.) But lack of diplomatic relations isn't the reason tournament organizers offered up for the visa denial. A statement from the government-run Dubai Tennis Championships attributed the denial to the organizers' fear that Peer's presence would provoke protests and security threats.
So what if it did?
Current Status
If Peer is willing to play, knowing that she is an unwitting lightning rod for minor anti-Israeli protest (over Gaza), as she was in New Zealand while playing in a tournament there (if you can call 20 people holding up signs a protest), then why not let her play? If the UAE is worried about security, why not beef up security measures? And since when is a country that specializes in suppressing protest, among other things it suppresses, suddenly worrying about protesters?Of course, it's not about security. It's not about a fear of protest. It's the same old banal bigotry that's kept Arab countries' intestines knotted up in nooses over Israel for years. The American Tennis Channel was right to refuse to televise the tournament. And the WTA, organizer of the women's tour, promises to rethink its relationship with Dubai. But it's an empty promise. The WTA shouldn't rethink the future. It should have acted immediately. It should have made it clear to Dubai: No Peer, no tournament. But money speaks louder than principles, especially when lip-service is so cheap.
Then you have actual players who, like Venus Williams, claim that "All the players support Shahar." Really? In that case, why did Williams not withdraw in support? Why didn't a single player not withdraw?
Background
Sports and principles are about as estranged these days as Muhammad Ali was from the country he didn't want to serve as a soldier in Vietnam in 1967. Remember Ali? One of the last truly principled athletes who willingly gave up all he had earned -- boxing titles, career, adulation, money, four years of boxing in his prime -- to stand by his conviction that as a Muslim he could not fight in the Vietnam War? Chances are today's athletes are so enamored of the shine on their sponsorship logos that they wouldn't know Ali from Muhammad.In 1980, the great Swedish player Bjorn Borg and his great American rival, John McEnroe, both of whom were at the top of their form following an epic five-set Wimbledon final that Borg won, agreed to meet in South Africa that December in a so-called "homeland" called Bophuthatswana for a $1 million match. The winner would be declared the world's No. 1.
The match was organized by South Africa's Southern Sun Hotels Organization and was to be televised live on NBC. But South Africa practiced apartheid: The black majority was institutionally denied rights and political representation that the white minority enjoyed. Civil rights groups in the United States and the great tennis player Arthur Ashe (the first black to win Wimbledon) put pressure on McEnroe to withdraw from the exhibition.
It took a while, but McEnroe finally agreed. "John and I felt it was neither the right time nor the right place for that match," McEnroe's father, John F. McEnroe Sr., said at a news conference.
Dubai does not practice apartheid, but many Arabs, especially Palestinians, and others around the world argue that Israel, in the Occupied Territories, does. Arab nations have routinely denied Israelis the right to travel and barred their nationals from traveling to Israel.
