Anti-Israel forces were at work before and during Saturday night’s basketball game in Sacramento featuring the Israeli Maccabi Haifa team against the kcal Sacramento Kings. The Sacramento Regional Coalition for Palestinian Rights fired off missives to the entire corpus of Kings players, owners, and coaches asking them to boycott the game.
Murad Sarama, who is a part of the coalition, told local Fox 40 News: “Unfortunately we did not hear anything back.” He added that he was protesting, “basically to show Americans that we have the same values and play basketball. Israel and the United States, they don’t have the same values.”
One protester at the game in Sleep Train Arena, who claimed his family was exiled from Haifa in 1948 in the Israeli War of Independence and cannot return, spouted to Fox 40, “We are very offended to have an Israeli team playing in Sacramento just two months after the Israeli war crimes in Gaza killing over 21 hundred people…My family was exiled from Haifa in 1948. And my family still lives in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.”
(After Israel’s Arab neighbors launched a war to wipe out the Jewish State, the Jews of Haifa actually begged the Arabs to stay, but the Arabs were encouraged by their brethren to leave and then return when the Jews had been erased.)
Other protesters told the credulous reporter, Doug Johnson, that the Israeli team playing in the United States offended them, citing Israel’s part in the Gaza war this summer. They said Israel uses the basketball team as a means of propaganda. One protester alleged, “I heard that traveling with the teams are some Israeli soldiers who were wounded in Gaza, and it’s just not acceptable to do that after what’s been going on.”
But Kings’ fans told Fox 40 that the preseason game was not any kind of political stage. One Kings fan who was questioned, Hardeep Sahota, said, “I think it’s just two teams playing, no big deal, no politics here.”
Image: Rich Pedroncelli/AP
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