At Gold Coast Stadium, nearly 13,000 kilometres from Tehran, Iran’s women’s national football team raised hands to their temples and most mouthed or sang along to the opening bars of “Mehr-e Khavaran (Eastern Sun)” before their match with Australia. The gesture marked a sharp contrast to the team’s silence three days earlier when their anthem played before the tournament opener against South Korea.
Observers say the change likely reflected pressure from authorities back home. Catherine Ordway, an Australian lawyer and sport integrity consultant who has worked with international sporting bodies, said the later display made clear the players “had received the message from home that they needed to demonstrate symbolic solidarity with their homeland, currently under siege.”
The scenes echoed the conduct of Iran’s men’s team at the 2022 World Cup, when they did not sing in their opener against England but mouthed words in a subsequent match. That episode took place amid domestic protests over women’s rights; the current unrest is tied to Iran’s responses to the US-Israeli conflict and the broader tensions it has provoked.
Ordway described the women’s earlier silence and moments when players loosened headscarves as “a profoundly brave form of physical dissent,” noting the particular risks women face in Iran and the regime’s history of punishing symbolic resistance.
At the Asian Cup the squad and staff have kept media contact to a minimum — appearing at mandatory press conferences and, by their direction, limiting questions to football. The strain on players was visible: 21-year-old striker Sara Didar fought back tears at a pre-match media event, telling reporters, “We’re all concerned and sad about what has happened to Iran and our families in Iran. I really hope for our country to have good news ahead. And I hope that my country will be strongly alive.”
Outside the stadium, protesters gathered before the Australia match. Some spectators waved the Lion and Sun flag used before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, while banners both supporting human rights and opposing Australia’s perceived backing of the US-Israeli actions were visible. For many Iranians, both inside and outside the country, international sport remains one of the few stages on which their struggles are visible.
But dissent carries heavy consequences. Recent high-profile cases include Sahar Khodayari, the “Blue Girl” who self-immolated in 2019 after being barred from a stadium and later died; wrestler Navid Afkari, executed in 2020 following a conviction related to protests; and Olympic medallist Kimia Alizadeh, who left Iran citing oppression. “The Iranian authorities use sport to enforce moral codes and suppress dissent, even for female spectators,” Ordway said. “Women athletes face additional layers of surveillance and punishment because their bodies are politicized, controlled, and heavily policed.”
On the pitch, Iran has struggled, losing 4-0 to Australia and 3-0 to South Korea, and a March 8 match with the Philippines is unlikely to alter their prospects of reaching the knockout rounds. Still, the players’ silence, salutes and mere presence at matches have taken on meaning far beyond results.
Tension around Iranian athletes may continue on the international calendar. Iran’s sole listed Paralympic athlete, Aboulfazl Khatibii Mianaei, is entered for men’s para cross-country skiing this week, and Iran’s men’s team will play at least three qualifiers in the United States for the 2026 World Cup. Ordway expects more low-key, deniable gestures from Iranian competitors and guarded comments in press settings, while overt protest is unlikely given heightened surveillance and risk. She added that members of the Iranian diaspora and international athletes are more likely to stage visible demonstrations of solidarity.
![{“title”:”November 1938 Pogroms Revealed Nazi Brutality”,”content”:”\”I can still clearly remember the morning of November 10,\” W. Michael Blumenthal recalled. \”My father was arrested early in the morning. Amid the commotion and despite the fact that my mother had forbidden me to do so, I went outside without being noticed. I saw the broken shop windows on Kurfürstendamm boulevard and smoke coming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.\” He was just 12 years old.\n\nThe Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin was set alight on the night of November 9, 1938, and the image of burning synagogues and shattered storefronts quickly became the emblem of a coordinated, nationwide assault on Jews. That night and the days that followed saw roughly 1,300 synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed; cemeteries, schools and homes were vandalized. Police largely stood aside as Jews were dragged into the streets, beaten and publicly humiliated. Fire brigades often refused to fight blazes in Jewish buildings, focusing instead on protecting \”Aryan\” properties.\n\nThe violence intensified on November 10, when about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps including Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Blumenthal\u2019s father was among those taken. Blumenthal remembered his mother\u2019s desperate questions as he was marched away: \”What’s going on? What are you doing with him? What has he done? Where is he being taken to?\” Even at 12, he felt the adults’ fear.\n\nBlumenthal’s family escaped to Shanghai in 1939, one of the few destinations then admitting Jewish refugees without visas. He later described his experience in his memoir From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century.\n\nThe attack did not come from nowhere. Anti-Jewish persecution had been official policy since the Nazis took power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legally defined Jews and imposed sweeping professional and social bans, and the program of \”Aryanization\” had already dispossessed many Jewish businesses and property. Still, historians mark November 1938 as a decisive break: the era of German Jewry as it had existed effectively ended, and German society was changed irreversibly.\n\nThe immediate pretext for the pogroms was the assassination on November 7, 1938, in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. Within hours of German radio reporting the killing, anti-Jewish riots erupted in some cities; two days later, after orders from the Nazi leadership, the violence was organized and intensified. At a gathering in Munich for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels drafted directives that called for the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Police were told not to intervene, firefighters were instructed to protect only non-Jewish buildings, and looting was officially prohibited even as theft nevertheless occurred.\n\nOfficials’ instructions were carried out across Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. Many Germans either joined the attacks or watched without intervening. \”The November 1938 pogrom was carried out in plain sight,\” said Raphael Gross, president of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. \”It could be seen by everyone \u2014 the press of the world, foreign diplomats and all citizens.\”\n\nDiplomats in Germany reported scenes of \”cultural barbarism\” and widespread looting; some accounts were especially brutal. Reports collected by Hermann Simon, former director of the Centrum Judaicum, included the Polish consul general in Leipzig describing a woman stripped and nearly raped, the Latvian ambassador likening Kurfurstendamm to a battlefield, and the Finnish envoy noting pervasive shame and condemnation among the German population. Governments received these dispatches, but most took only limited action. A small number of concrete responses did follow: for example, the Kindertransport to England began after November 1938, bringing many children to safety. But by and large international reactions were inadequate.\n\nFew at the time predicted the scope of what would come. In a stark misjudgment, the Italian embassy wrote on November 16, 1938, that it was inconceivable Germany would one day send hundreds of thousands to execution or confine them in massive camps.\n\nHistorians today regard the events of November 9, 1938, as a turning point that revealed the regime’s readiness for widespread, state-condoned violence against Jews. Because the old term \”Kristallnacht\” is now seen as trivializing, the events are more accurately referred to as the Reichspogromnacht or the November Pogroms.\n\nThis piece is a rewritten account of reporting originally published in German and previously adapted in English.”]}](https://fresh-world-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/914-17213993_6-440x248.jpg)
![{“title”:”November 1938 Pogroms Revealed Nazi Brutality”,”content”:”\”I can still clearly remember the morning of November 10,\” W. Michael Blumenthal recalled. \”My father was arrested early in the morning. Amid the commotion and despite the fact that my mother had forbidden me to do so, I went outside without being noticed. I saw the broken shop windows on Kurfürstendamm boulevard and smoke coming out of the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse.\” He was just 12 years old.\n\nThe Fasanenstrasse synagogue in Berlin was set alight on the night of November 9, 1938, and the image of burning synagogues and shattered storefronts quickly became the emblem of a coordinated, nationwide assault on Jews. That night and the days that followed saw roughly 1,300 synagogues and some 7,500 Jewish businesses destroyed; cemeteries, schools and homes were vandalized. Police largely stood aside as Jews were dragged into the streets, beaten and publicly humiliated. Fire brigades often refused to fight blazes in Jewish buildings, focusing instead on protecting \”Aryan\” properties.\n\nThe violence intensified on November 10, when about 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps including Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. Blumenthal\u2019s father was among those taken. Blumenthal remembered his mother\u2019s desperate questions as he was marched away: \”What’s going on? What are you doing with him? What has he done? Where is he being taken to?\” Even at 12, he felt the adults’ fear.\n\nBlumenthal’s family escaped to Shanghai in 1939, one of the few destinations then admitting Jewish refugees without visas. He later described his experience in his memoir From Exile to Washington: A Memoir of Leadership in the Twentieth Century.\n\nThe attack did not come from nowhere. Anti-Jewish persecution had been official policy since the Nazis took power in 1933. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 legally defined Jews and imposed sweeping professional and social bans, and the program of \”Aryanization\” had already dispossessed many Jewish businesses and property. Still, historians mark November 1938 as a decisive break: the era of German Jewry as it had existed effectively ended, and German society was changed irreversibly.\n\nThe immediate pretext for the pogroms was the assassination on November 7, 1938, in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. Within hours of German radio reporting the killing, anti-Jewish riots erupted in some cities; two days later, after orders from the Nazi leadership, the violence was organized and intensified. At a gathering in Munich for the anniversary of the Beer Hall Putsch, propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels drafted directives that called for the destruction of Jewish businesses and synagogues. Police were told not to intervene, firefighters were instructed to protect only non-Jewish buildings, and looting was officially prohibited even as theft nevertheless occurred.\n\nOfficials’ instructions were carried out across Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt and hundreds of smaller towns and villages. Many Germans either joined the attacks or watched without intervening. \”The November 1938 pogrom was carried out in plain sight,\” said Raphael Gross, president of the Deutsches Historisches Museum. \”It could be seen by everyone \u2014 the press of the world, foreign diplomats and all citizens.\”\n\nDiplomats in Germany reported scenes of \”cultural barbarism\” and widespread looting; some accounts were especially brutal. Reports collected by Hermann Simon, former director of the Centrum Judaicum, included the Polish consul general in Leipzig describing a woman stripped and nearly raped, the Latvian ambassador likening Kurfurstendamm to a battlefield, and the Finnish envoy noting pervasive shame and condemnation among the German population. Governments received these dispatches, but most took only limited action. A small number of concrete responses did follow: for example, the Kindertransport to England began after November 1938, bringing many children to safety. But by and large international reactions were inadequate.\n\nFew at the time predicted the scope of what would come. In a stark misjudgment, the Italian embassy wrote on November 16, 1938, that it was inconceivable Germany would one day send hundreds of thousands to execution or confine them in massive camps.\n\nHistorians today regard the events of November 9, 1938, as a turning point that revealed the regime’s readiness for widespread, state-condoned violence against Jews. Because the old term \”Kristallnacht\” is now seen as trivializing, the events are more accurately referred to as the Reichspogromnacht or the November Pogroms.\n\nThis piece is a rewritten account of reporting originally published in German and previously adapted in English.”]}](https://fresh-world-news.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/914-17213993_6-320x180.jpg)