Before the Premier League match between Crystal Palace and AFC Bournemouth (5-3), a racist incident occurred not far from the stadium. Zafir Iqbal, head of the medical department at Palace, and his children were insulted by a three-year-old child. Iqbal described the incident on Twitter, but doesn’t want to draw any connection to English football.
“Devastated and speechless,” Iqbal wrote on Twitter. “I went with my two youngest children to their first game in Selhurst Park when a three-year-old said to his father, ‘Look Dad, there’s Pakis.'” Since the 1960s, Paki has been used as a racist and derogatory insult to immigrants from southern Asia.
Iqbal asks not to associate the incident with his club: “Racism is not a football problem. Just to be clear: This has nothing to do with Crystal Palace. All the clubs I worked for had fantastic fans. This rather shows how such behavior is normalized in our society.” In his tweets, Iqbal regrets the trivialisation of racism and discrimination in everyday life.
In this regard, Iqbal has uploaded a collage on the front pages of the English tabloid Daily Mail. On these, headlines can be read that repeatedly critically deal with the topic of refugees and foreigners.
The Daily Mail has been accused several times in the past of writing populist articles, the Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote about the English paper in 2013: “Some of the political columnists are writing such blooming madness together that one can never be sure whether they really mean it.
