The Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), Europe’s governing soccer body, requested that all European international games hold a minute of silence before the start of their matches and wear black armbands to honor the victims of the recent Paris attacks.
Today’s (Nov. 17) Greece vs. Turkey friendly soccer match in Istanbul did just that.
Instead of observing the one minute of silence, however, the mainly Turkish fans in the stadium booed and chanted “Allahu akbar”.
Turkey is a Muslim country — the same country whose president and former prime minister Recep Erdoğan famously said: “A moderate Islam is an oxymoron because there is no such thing as a ‘moderate Islam’.” (source: Telegraph)
The Turkey-Greece soccer game was not the only European match where the minute of silence was interrupted.
Douglas Zimmerman reports for SFGate (San Francisco Chronicle) that at the Ireland-Bosnia Euro 2016 playoff game yesterday, a Bosnian fan disrupted the moment of silence yelling “Palestine, Palestine.”
According to Source, a Bosnian news website, the shouter was later beaten up by other Bosnian supporters. An eyewitness told Source: “I don’t know the guy, don’t know his name. I know that he was drunk and that he was the only one who disrupted the moment of silence chanting ‘Palestine, Palestine’. Some of our fans ran into him at the hotel after that game and asked him if he was the one who was shouting. He said he was, raising his voice. Then our fans hit him a couple of times.”
~Eowyn