This Week The World Finally Reacted To Anti-Israel Bias

Eric Trager notes that when Israeli tennis star Shahar Peer was denied a visa by the UAE and excluded from the Dubai Tennis Championships this past weekend, something unexpected happened: there was international outrage:

For once, Jewish leaders weren’t the only voices speaking out against anti-Israeli exclusion.  Indeed, the Wall Street Journal withdrew its sponsorship; the Women’s Tennis Association, which initially considered canceling the event until Peer rejected the idea, announced that it might eliminate the event from next year’s schedule; and the Tennis Channel refused to broadcast the week-long tournament in protest.  The response was so overwhelming that the U.A.E. was immediately on the defensive: the tournament’s organizers first claimed - very dubiously - that they were merely trying to protect Peer from anti-Israel protesters, but later vowed that Andy Ram, another Israeli player, would be granted a visa for next week’s men’s bracket. That has since happened.

While Trager credits the nature of sports for bringing this incident out into the open and encouraging both world reaction and condemnation, the bottom line is that:

if Shahar Peer’s exclusion from the Dubai Tennis Championships has served any greater purpose, it is to call attention to decades of Arab discrimination against Israelis and - within one fateful week - reverse it on a most public stage.

And that is a victory too.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Dubai Tennis Championships and Shahar Peer.