LOS ANGELES — 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.

Soccer’s global governing body has included Iran’s pre-revolutionary Lion and Sun flag — a favorite symbol of those protesting the régime in Tehran — 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.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court court judge upheld the ban last week after a challenge from the Southern California-based Institute for Voice of Liberty, which argued that FIFA was targeting “protected symbolic and political speech” in violation of California law.

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.

As Iran’s 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.

Under FIFA’s rules, he told her, she could wear the Lion and Sun but not “display” 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’s ban.

“If it’s not supposed to be political, why can you have the post-revolutionary flag and not the pre-revolutionary flag?” the woman remarked after. “And why isn’t like anyone else’s flag banned, like the Venezuelan flag, or whatever?”

The pre-Islamic Revolution flag has become a point of tension reflecting a deeper struggle over Iranian identity, dissent and representation on the world stage. It has has become a common symbol of protest amid the war in Iran, and when the flag of the Islamic Republic was rolled out on the field on Monday night, lots of fans countered with the Lion and Sun.

Fidgeting in his seat moments before kickoff, an Iranian-American man who declined to give his name sported a white T-shirt and black shorts and mulled his fashion choices. Though he supported the Iranian soccer team, he said he couldn’t bring himself to wear any official gear featuring the country’s current flag. He had also decided it was too fraught to show up in any gear emblazoned with the Lion and Sun. But as the Iranian team took the field to an explosion of noise from the mostly pro-Iran crowd, he seemed to second-guess his decidedly neutral sartorial choice.

There were other options. Outside, a man held a tri-country display, blending the flags of Israel, the United States and pre-revolution Iran. Meanwhile, the woman who had been approached by the FIFA official — and who gave her name only as Nicole out of fear she could be identified by the régime in Iran — wore a T-shirt with the pre-revolutionary flag. She had picked up a batch the previous day from a Westwood-based group allied with exiled opposition leader Reza Pahlavi that had organized pre-match protests.

Now each of the six family members in her row, including aunts and uncles who had moved to the U.S. after the 1979 revolution, was decked out in the Iranian flag. Each, said Nicole, was preparing to boo if Iran scored a goal.

“It’s a government team,” she said. “This is bittersweet. It’s the first time that Iran has a chance of making it out of the group stage, because last time they were in the Group of Death. But it’s like: how happy can you really be?”

Forrás