In a very current (only about 5 weeks overdue?) response to the cricketing world I have been thinking about the sentiment of keeping politics out of sport, mostly regarding Usman Khawaja’s thwarted attempt to show some solidarity with the people of Palestine. It’s hard not to, as the situation in Gaza is unrelentingly horrifying, and public figures are so reluctant to say anything.
As a recap, or in case you were busy that week: Khawaja had worn shoes in training with the words “freedom is a human right” and “all lives are equal”, written in the colours of the Palestinian flag. He didn’t end up wearing the shoes for the Test against Pakistan, but did wear a black armband and was sanctioned by the ICC. He subsequently applied to wear the image of a dove holding an olive branch on his bat with a reference to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which, while it had the backing of Cricket Australia, was denied by the ICC.
In 2014, something similar happened with Moeen Ali, who was cleared by the ECB to wear wristbands saying “Save Gaza” and “Free Palestine” during a Test match, but this was subsequently banned by the ICC.
(Worth noting as an aside that in both these instances it was a Muslim player on a Western team who displayed a message and copped it, with little to no public support from their white teammates.)
The official ICC line is: “Approval shall not be granted for messages which relate to political, religious or racial activities or causes. The ICC shall have the final say in determining whether any such message is approved.”
And yet. International cricketers took the knee for Black Lives Matter (a movement that overwhelmingly shows solidarity with Palestinians, by the way). England players have supported Stonewall’s Rainbow Laces campaign during a Test match to promote LGBT inclusion (though nobody really says anything about the T, as we’ve seen…)
“Keep politics out of sport” means different things at different times to different people. It could mean “stop politicians using sport to their advancement”, “expedite my player’s visa”, “don’t let players express political opinions”, “stop TMS being infected by woke (by letting women and people of colour on)”, and so on. I think a lot of the time it also means “I don’t want to be troubled with thinking about this in my leisure time”.
The desire for sport to be a form of escapism from the real world is fair enough. I like to turn on the cricket to spend several hours insulated from what I generally just call The Horrors. I get it. Let she who has not given a family member a list of topics they can never discuss again for the sake of their relationship cast the first stone.
Is cricket being entirely divorced from politics actually achievable? No, of course not, I can’t think of a single thing that could be. It’s just as fictional as the idea that our team selection operates as a pure meritocracy (sorry Sam Billings). How can you possibly keep politics separate from sports when the pinnacle of basically every sport is representing your country? That nationalism alone can’t be divested of politics, even before you get to singing (or not) the national anthem at the beginning of a cricket match, wearing your country’s emblem on your shirt, playing in a stadium named after your sitting prime minister, your international governing body being in financial partnership with Saudi oil, the sport’s entire existence on an international level being a legacy of British colonialism…you get me.
Political gestures are accepted in the upper echelons of sports administration as long as they have overwhelming societal support, and with Black Lives Matter in 2020 probably the only recent exception, expressed in the vaguest possible terms, as in the “cricket is a game for everyone” t-shirts worn by the England men’s team at the start of 2021. It’s fair to say that “racism is bad” and “homophobia is bad” are generally accepted as the correct stance in our society. This isn’t to say that these actions haven’t also been criticised by bigoted sports fans, but rather that those in charge are happy to go whichever way the wind blows. These gestures, though not without value, are ultimately low risk, low reward.
(The idea of the ICC being the arbiter of what is a politically appropriate statement while it turns a blind eye to the absurd nationalism of the Narendra Modi Stadium, continue to allow Afghanistan full member status despite having no women’s team, ban trans women from international cricket with no scientific grounding in a decision that affects literally one woman, ignore whatever Jay Shah, the son of India’s Minister of Home Affairs is up to over there, gobble up d€li¢iou$ pint$ of Aram¢o etc etc is a hell of a pisstake isn’t it, but we could be here all night on that)
Taking the knee is an example of when a meaningful political gesture became reduced to mere gesture politics. When it became widely adopted, although popular, it wasn’t uncontroversial. There was actual stuff happening at home and abroad, there were huge marches, there was real, angry protest that became symbolised across the world of sport by players taking the knee. But as time ticked on, its power got diluted, and eventually some athletes refused to do it on that basis.
Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha was one: “I think the meaning behind the whole thing is becoming something that we just do now. That’s not enough. I’m not going to take the knee….We are trying to say we are equal but these things are not working,” he said. “Unless there’s change, don’t ask me about it. Unless action is going to happen I don’t want to hear about it.”
If you’ve worked in charities, or even just marketing, you’ll know that awareness and advocacy isn’t an end goal, it’s meant to be the first step towards some kind of meaningful action. That could be donating, signing a petition, subscribing to a mailing list, attending an event – the question is, now people are aware, what’s next, how do we make it happen, and how does it help us achieve our aims? So England’s cricketers took the knee – did anything change as a result?
Back to Khawaja and Palestine.
The “loophole” as it were that came up when Khawaja was trying to negotiate a statement about Palestine that the ICC would consider acceptable was, as Moeen Ali argued with his “Free Palestine” and “Save Gaza” wristbands, that his statement was a humanitarian one, rather than political.
This distinction of “humanitarian” as apolitical is a strange one, as it’s utterly fictional. There’s no humanitarian cause in this world that isn’t political – even crises caused by natural disasters are political. It’s a word that has come to be used to depoliticise events for our own comfort. The conflict in Gaza is frequently described in ways like “a humanitarian crisis”, allowing us to imagine this as something that just happened, so we can say “these poor people need help” without engaging with the entity responsible for it, without having to “take sides”. Having worked in an NGO that provided relief in Gaza, having to write copy in the passive voice, avoiding naming Israel or any “political” sentiment was compulsory, and endlessly frustrating.
A thing people find uncomfortable: sometimes things are black and white. We like to frame troubling issues as shades of grey so as to make it impossible to be unequivocally in the wrong, to allow us to avoid taking sides by protesting that it’s too complicated or we aren’t educated enough to have a real opinion.
There are many who would have you believe that you need an in-depth knowledge of Middle Eastern geopolitics in order to have an opinion on what’s happening in Gaza right now. You absolutely do not. What Israel is doing to Palestine is desperately, horrifyingly wrong. Mass killing of civilians, destroying every university in Gaza, attacking hospitals, robbing children of their parents, robbing parents of their children, wiping out entire bloodlines, cutting off food, water, fuel, electricity. Israel’s attacks on Gaza are definitionally war crimes, and I think, I think, we’ve collectively agreed that war crimes are wrong.
Of course, those in power in the West, Britain very much included, would be sweating at the idea that indiscriminately flattening Middle Eastern countries with fictitious claims of military targets in civilian locations be collectively deemed unequivocally wrong. There’s certainly a vested interest in peddling the rhetoric that this is an issue on which regular individuals can’t take a strong position because it’s too complex.
Palestine has been made such a contentious issue that even the most sanitised protest from someone in the public eye, like Khawaja’s messages on his boots – which were so benign as so be unidentifiable as related to Palestine were it not for the red, green and black colours of the words – or his proposed alternative of a dove on his bat, was more impactful than taking the knee would be now.
When Khawaja said “when I’m looking at my Instagram and seeing innocent kids, videos of them dying, passing away, that’s what hit me the hardest…I don’t get anything out of this. I just feel like it’s my responsibility to speak up on this”, he echoed the sentiment of pretty much everyone I know, but he did it from a position to be heard, and discussed by thousands of people across the world. When it comes to international cricketers, the risk of taking a stand (say a sanction from the ICC, or negative press coverage) is surely a hit worth taking for the cause.
I’m not thick*, I know there’s no world in which star cricketers would band together to collectively use their influence to change the world for the better. But in a sport that is practically devoid of activism for anything other than NFTs, I’d take a few more sticking their necks out for a change.
*ymmv, but I was smart enough not to make a tortured Walter Benjamin “aura” reference in the above, checkmate.
Ildikó Connell is the main admin @daisycutterzine, you can direct personal abuse there but she probably won’t fight you
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