Soccer’s Own Goal

The invasion of Ceuta exposes the dismal failure of the 2026 World Cup. Whatever warm and fuzzy message international sporting events convey, Muslims ain’t buying it.

If you thought the 1936 Berlin Olympics were a prelude to World War II, wait till you see what the 2026 World Cup portends.

Adolf Hitler inherited the Olympics when he assumed power in 1933, and wanted to ditch the project. He thought such schmaltzy international fraternalism was incompatible with Germany’s new image as an emerging, aggressive superpower.

His propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels convinced him otherwise. The Olympics could showcase Germany’s strong, modern, peaceful culture, and the athletic superiority of Aryans. It would also boost the German economy.

To emphasise Germany’s good intentions, they came up with the idea of lighting the Olympic torch in Olympia, Greece, and relaying it by runners the 3200 kilometres to the stadium in Berlin. Europeans will love it!

The goodwill engendered by the Games would, meanwhile, help buy time while Hitler’s plans to rearm and expand into neighbouring nations – essentially kicking off World War II – continued behind the scenes. What was not to love?

There was widespread scepticism about Hitler’s sudden conversion to the symbolism and fraternalism of sport. This was the bloke who had passed the Nuremberg Laws in September 1935, which more or less made it illegal to be Jewish in Germany, paving the way for what would later become the Holocaust.

Debates raged about whether or not to boycott the Games. In the end, only Russia and Spain stayed away; 49 countries competed, 12 more than competed at the previous Olympics in Los Angeles in 1932.

Authorities sanitised Germany’s image for the athletes and journalists visiting Berlin from around the world. They removed “Jews not welcome” signs from the streets and added token Jews to the German Olympics squad, even though by then the first Jewish concentration camp, at Dachau, had been operating for more than three years.

The true Germany made itself apparent soon afterwards. The Holocaust began in earnest in 1938, and German troops marched into Poland in 1939.

In hindsight, participation in the 1936 Olympics was one of the greatest acts of naivety of the century.

Ordinary people might one day say the same about the 2026 World Cup.

This time, though, the participants who are most likely to start the next world war were not trying to hide their belligerence.

It’s one thing to be aggressive on the field, as Argentinian players were during the final, but it’s another to perform sujood after scoring a goal or winning a game, as the Moroccan and Egyptian teams did. This transformed a shared sporting spectacle into what was to them an exclusively Islamic occasion. Given that Islam is essentially a theocracy preoccupied with territorial conquest, this was a deliberately provocative act.

But the onfield sujood also, rather insensitively, replicates the same mass prayers that are daily clogging up the streets of western countries to which Muslims have migrated en masse.

To put it politely: it’s bad enough for us westerners to see sujood being performed on the streets our ancestors built, but do we need to see it on our televisions while we are trying to watch a freaking game of soccer as well?

When France defeated Morocco on July 9, tens of thousands of Moroccans naturally rioted on the streets of Paris, London and The Netherlands. This made as much sense as Nazi Germans including token Jews in their 1936 Olympics squad while sending other Jews to Dachau. If Moroccans love Morocco so much, why don’t they live there?

Ten days later, despite clear signs that the Muslim world hadn’t embraced this message of sport bringing humanity together, FIFA doubled down by shoehorning a 12-minute show choreographed by Coldplay’s Chris Martin into the half time of the final. It preached the virtues of love, unity, environmentalism, education and, in the case of 67-year-old Madonna, who opened the extravaganza, the perpetual youthfulness of plastic surgery and lens filters.

It was the same schmaltzy message that the entertainment industry has been churning out since The New Seekers recorded I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing (in Perfect Harmony) in 1971, only this time with the backing of globalist forces that stand to make more money from it all than the music industry dared imagine.

Behind the half-time entertainment was a group called Global Citizen, which was founded in Melbourne by 29-year-old “social entrepreneur” Hugh Evans in 2008, which has since globalised and developed close ties with the World Economic Forum and other shadowy unelected forces.

It wants to end poverty and save the planet not by fostering economic independence or inventing methods to clean up the environment but by raising tens of billions from guilt-ridden rich people to distribute to themselves and the poor.

The rejection of the World Cup’s message of peace and mutual respect came loud and clear a mere 10 days later, when Moroccan authorities facilitated an invasion of Spanish territory, in Ceuta. Some 50,000 military-age men, including recently pardoned and released criminals, flooded into the small Spanish enclave, breaking into homes, threatening locals, defecating on the streets and trashing the place.

Not even Hitler would have dared to turn the message of love and unity on its head so quickly.

I’ll be honest here. I didn’t watch a single match of the World Cup. I used to love it, but like all professional sports, it has become superficial theatre for the benefit of commercial broadcasters.

Few of the national teams were made up of indigenous players, so the idea that this was a spectacle of competing nations is laughable. If all the French players came out wearing English jerseys, and the English wore Australian ones, most casual fans would not even notice.

There was a time when broadcasters simply and benignly broadcasted these events. The event itself had primacy. Now the event must be distorted to suit the demands of the all-powerful broadcasters. FIFA did this by allowing a “rehydration break” during each half so advertisers could plug their products to the billions of captive viewers.

The broadcasters are not even remotely interested in the supposed purpose of the World Cup, to foment goodwill between nations. They just want to use the event to make as much money as possible.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the message was so quickly and comprehensively rejected by the people who need to heed it the most.

The next time Germany hosted the Olympics – in Munich in 1972 – what should have been a celebration of the country that caused World War II returning to the family of nations was marred when Palestinian terrorists stormed the village and killed 11 Israeli athletes.

We must stop kidding ourselves that all this schmaltz about sport and unity will ever work. It just makes us look dumb and naive.

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