Last month, Dubai refused to grant entry to Shahar Peer, an Israeli tennis player who deserved to compete in the Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships. This prompted the Tennis Channel to pull out of covering the tournament.
“This is an easy decision to come by, based on what is right and wrong,” Ken Solomon, the chairman and chief executive of the network, said at the time. “Sports are about merit, absent of background, class, race, creed, color or religion. They are simply about talent. This is a classic case, not about what country did what to another country. If the state of Israel were barring a citizen of an Arab nation, we would have made the same decision.”
The move made Solomon a little hero, even earned him a speaking engagement at the AIPAC dinner last Sunday at the Universal Hilton. What it also did was protect the Tennis Channel from the anger now being directed at Barclays, the British bank that sponsored the tournament.
This morning, I received a series of emails between Lenny Kristal of Berkeley, Calif., and a Barclays executive. Kristal and two other Jews, one in New York and the other in Israel, are looking for a guarantee that:
“Barclays Bank Plc will not lend its name to any future event or tournament which results in the discrimination of participants on the basis of race, creed, color or nationality by event co-sponsors or host governments. And if such discrimination were to occur, Barclays Bank Plc would immediately withdraw as a sponsor of such an event.”
Otherwise, Kristal warns, Barclays can count on a global divestment drive. Here’s the story from a British publication called The Jewish News. After the jump, a March 10 email to Barclays executive from Kristal et al:
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