Iranian Chess Player Refuses to Play Israeli
A top Iranian chess player was booted from an international tournament when he refused to play against an Israeli.
Iranian grandmaster Ehsan Ghaem Maghami, was supposed to play Israel’s Ehud Shachar in the fourth round of the Corsica Masters, after a computer drew the two against one another, The New York Times reported.
Tournament director Leo Battesti said Maghami cannot choose to avoid the five Israelis out of the 186 players in the competition.
“I told him, you cannot involve your rules in my tournament,” he said.
Iranian athletes and teams often try to avoid competing against Israelis, with mixed results.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO