If you’ve spent any time lately inhaling the fumes of mainstream news, you’d be forgiven for thinking the Iranian Women’s Football team had just stormed the Bastille in football boots. The Western media—a collection of ghouls who couldn’t find Tehran on a map—has collectively decided that the team’s silence during the national anthem was a choreographed middle finger to the Ayatollah.

It is a narrative so hallucinatory, so utterly detached from the cold, hard tarmac of reality, that it makes Mamak logic look like a PhD in Physics. We are witnessing a high-speed collision between a clown car and a durian truck, and the “suits” in the press box are trying to convince us the resulting smell is actually Chanel No. 5.

Let’s perform a quick, messy autopsy on this “protest.” The press is swooning because these women didn’t belt out the anthem at the Asian Cup. They’re calling it a “shattering act of defiance,” a “silent scream for liberty,” and various other phrases harvested from a bargain-bin screenplay.

Pull the other one; it’s got bells on. In the Islamic Republic, women singing in public is about as legal as selling pork sausages at a Friday prayer. It is a fundamental prohibition. If those women had opened their mouths and unleashed a soulful rendition of the anthem, they would have been breaking the very laws the West claims they are currently protesting. To frame their silence as a revolutionary gambit is like claiming I’m protesting the price of petrol by not flying my private jet to buy a pack of cigarettes.

A “proper” act of defiance—the kind that actually risks the neck—would have involved them tearing off those hijabs and belting out the anthem like a rockstar in the centre circle. Instead, they stood there, muted by the suffocating weight of the status quo, only to be recycled as narrative puppets by news outlets that treat Middle Eastern women like a Rorschach test for their own “regime change” fantasies. Western establishment has a long-standing, almost erotic obsession with “liberating” Middle Eastern countries. By framing every blink or silence as a “revolt,” they are feeding the public a fantasy that the local population is just begging for Western intervention.

These mainstream outlets aren’t interested in the emotional state of the players. They are interested in the sovereignty gambit. They need a heartwarming “human interest” angle to grease the wheels for the next round of missile strikes or a cheeky bit of military aggression. It is a badly scripted drama where the athletes are merely props in a “pro-war” theatre production staged by people who think “cultural nuance” is a type of expensive yogurt.

By reframing a mandated silence as a political choice, the media effectively puts a target on these women’s backs while patting themselves on the back for their “progressive” coverage. It’s a parasitic relationship where the journalist gets a Pulitzer nod and the athlete gets an unnecessary interrogation.

And where, you might ask, is the governing body of the beautiful game during this bureaucratic theatre?

FIFA’s silence makes the Iranian team look like a heavy metal concert. Gianni Infantino, a man who appears to have been carved out of a block of expensive soap and polished with the tears of underpaid stadium workers, has been remarkably quiet. He navigates the world of international relations with the grace of a clown car crashing into a Nasi Lemak stall, spilling the sambal of integrity all over the pitch while he counts his kickbacks.

The “nauseating bromance” between Infantino and Donald Trump is a masterclass in moral bankruptcy. Infantino doesn’t care about the sanctity of the sport or the safety of these women; he’s too busy scouting for the next gold-plated handshake. He’s a man who would sell the rights to the afterlife if he thought the devil had a decent broadcast package. FIFA’s lack of responsibility isn’t an oversight; it’s a business model built on the foundation of looking the other way while the money changes hands.

The Western media is treating this silence as a “brave shout” because it suits a specific, blood-soaked agenda. They are insulting our intelligence, assuming we can’t see the wires pulling the arms of these “protest” stories. They want us to believe in a fairy tale where a lack of singing equals a geopolitical shift, all while the women involved are trapped in a social labyrinth that the “suits” in Washington couldn’t begin to fathom.

Unless the laws of physics and common sense decide to take a collective holiday, we should call this what it is: The exploitation of athletes by a media machine that views the Middle East as nothing more than a giant chessboard for ‘bigwigs’ with too much ego and not enough soul.