Kaiser Steps Up To Protest Against Iran

Kaiser Franz - political with a small 'p'

FIFA Executive Committee member Franz Beckenbauer was one of 100 prominent Germans who signed an open letter to the Iranian government appealing for the release of two German journalists arrested in October for interviewing the son of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, who was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.

The Kaiser’s not exactly chaining himself to the embassy gates, and he’s due to step down from the Committee soon in any case, and no doubt he is signing the letter as an individual first, and as a member of the FIFA ExCom not at all. Nonetheless, let’s be thankful for the tiniest sign: it is possible for a FIFA functionary to express a view on a human rights issue that doesn’t relate directly to football.

Ironically, the journalists are from the xenophobic gutter-rag Bild am Sonntag, the Sunday edition of the German daily Bild Zeitung, in which Beckenbauer's been writing a witless opinion column for decades. It's also a newspaper not accustomed to campaigning for human rights unless they directly affect the welfare of German nationals, especially its own journalists. 

Bild has, however, at least left an impression on German literature - as the thinly disguised newspaper that ruined a woman’s reputation and drove her to suicide in Heinrich Böll’s novella Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum), and as the real-life publication infiltrated in the 1970s by investigative journalist Günter Wallraff, who exposed its dubious and devious means of operation, and its callous disregard for the people it covered, in Der Aufmacher: Der Mann, der bei Bild Hans Esser war (Lead Story: The man who was Hans Esser at Bild).

Wallraff is the kind of journalist that Sepp Blatter would no doubt describe as “obsessed”, a worthy predecessor of Andrew Jennings and Jens Weinreich - Blatter’s tireless tormentors who continue to lobby for transparency at FIFA and a satisfactory explanation of numerous cases of corruption going back decades that the body has never been adequately called to account for.