The Lion and Sun flag dominated the stadium tonight. So FIFA went into overdrive trying to censor it.
At the Iran vs. New Zealand World Cup match, the stadium was flooded with Lion and Sun flags and shirts. Not the flag of the Islamic Republic, but the real flag of Iran. It was everywhere.
Yet if you watched on TV, you wouldn’t see any of it.
The cameras avoided the stands. Crowd shots in the background were blurred. And compared to virtually every other World Cup match so far, there was remarkably little focus on the crowd. Of course, intentional.
They can ban the Lion and Sun from stadiums. They can crop it out of broadcasts. They can try to erase it from the world’s view.
But they cannot erase the reality that thousands upon thousands of Iranians showed up carrying the symbol of a free Iran.
You can censor a flag from a broadcast.
You cannot censor an entire nation.