A businessman from South Africa who claimed to represent the Diadora sportswear maker in a boycott action against a Jewish cricket player has no ties to the company, Diadora said.
Juan Carlos Venti, the head of institutional and external relations at the Italy-based firm, distanced Diadora from the businessman, Azhar Saloojee on Wednesday.
Saloojee, a cricket enthusiast was quoted last month announcing a boycott by Diadora’s South Africa branch against cricketer David Teeger over Teeger’s remarks supporting Israel and its troops fighting in Gaza.
“Mr. Azhar Salojee [sic] has no role whatsoever in Diadora’s organization,” Venti said, adding that Saloojee’s remarks on Teeger do not represent Diadora’s position.
Teeger, in an October 22 public speech, praised Israeli soldiers fighting Hamas in Gaza, whereupon Cricket South Africa, the sport’s national governing body, stripped him of the captainship of the under-19 team for the 2024 Cricket World Cup. He was also subjected to an ethics probe, in which he was cleared of allegations that his speech violated the cricket body’s ethics code.
The Teeger affair was widely reported in the media in South Africa and beyond.
Wim Trengove, an adjudicator working for Cricket South Africa, identified Saloojee as “a director of Diadora” in a 20-page determination that Trengove submitted on December 5 to Cricket South Africa about the Teeger affair. Trengove, who is among South Africa’s foremost jurists, quoted Saloojee as saying that Saloojee “will not tolerate Mr Teeger playing in any competition sponsored by Diadora.”
Major media outlets in South Africa, including News24, a mainstream news site, also identified Saloojee as a director of Diadora in South Africa.
The South Africa-Israel Chamber of Commerce last month wrote to Diadora to complain about Saloojee’s remarks, asking the company to clarify whether he spoke for Diadora. The firm replied to the Chamber’s December 12 complaint on Tuesday, the Chamber said, saying that Saloojee has no ties to Diadora.
In his October 22 speech, Teeger said that he was dedicating an award he’d received “to the State of Israel and to every single soldier fighting so that we can live and thrive in the Diaspora.”
Teeger’s subsequent demotion, Cricket South Africa said, was to protect the team from hostile action by pro-Palestinian activists, but many believe it was merely punishing Teeger despite acquitting him of violating the ethics code.
South African Jewry is one of the world’s most outspokenly Zionist communities. Teeger’s demotion, to many South African Jews, is a form of political persecution with a chilling effect on their freedom of expression and the uniting effect of cricket, one of the country’s most popular sports.
On Wednesday, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, the main political arm of the country’s organized Jewish community, announced that it was organizing a protest rally on Thursday outside Cricket South Africa’s headquarters in Johannesburg over Teeger’s demotion. The rally is titled “Rise Up Against Antisemitism at Cricket SA.”
Last week, South Africa dragged Israel before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing it of perpetrating genocide in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip — an allegation Israel has rejected as a baseless libel. Israel invaded the Gaza Strip with the declared goal of dismantling Hamas after 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists killed some 1,200 people, amid brutal atrocities, in a murderous rampage in southern Israel on October 7. The terrorists also abducted 240 people, roughly 132 of whom are still being held in Gaza.
Israel’s actions against Hamas have resulted in 24,000 deaths in Gaza, according to unverified figures provided by Hamas medical authorities in Gaza that include its own terror operatives and victims of failed rocket launches at Israel. Israel says it has killed some 9,000 Hamas operatives in Gaza and blames Hamas for the deaths of noncombatants the terror group uses as human shields.