Palestine Wins the World Cup
No, really...even though Palestine wasn't in the World Cup, and in fact is not even a real place.
Because I have lived in the Middle East, I get a lot of Facebook posts from there, including an amazing amount of Arab propaganda. I have seen hundreds of posts proclaiming the victory that "Palestine" achieved in an event they didn't even participate in. Much of it was in the form of cartoons, like this:
or many more malicious ones:
Here is an idiotic one of a "Palestinian" kicking a ball hitting an Israeli in the head, while he is cheered on by cartoon supporters.
Here's one showing noble Palestinians playing a match against Israeli soldiers with guns. This one is particularly ironic because of the torrent of abuse currently directed at Israeli troops for killing a Palestinian "footballer" who was actually a member of Hamas, who in a video of his death is shown shooting an automatic weapon toward Israeli civilians.
Here's one of many celebrating an attack by an Arab street gang on an Israeli reporter, apparently regarded as an act of great heroism in the Arab world.
And here are Palestinian flags all over the grandstands, which must be shown in cartoon form, since nothing remotely resembling this ever took place in real life.
Now for a couple of photos:
Here is one of literally hundreds of photos showing people holding up "Palestinian" flags at the World Cup. It has been pretty thoroughly documented that Palestinian propagandists were constantly present at this event, providing the flags and inducing people to hold them up for pictures, which are then published as an indication of some sort of world-wide support.
And here we see straight out the idiotic claim that Palestine was the biggest winner of an event which they did not even participate in.
I have lots more of these pathetic graphics, but I think that is enough. Let's talk about what this all means.
As I mentioned, I have lived in the Middle East, where I knew and worked with Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and Bedouins. In my experience, the overwhelming majority of them want what most anyone else in the world wants: a chance to live a decent life free from economic suffering and meaningless political violence, not an endless struggle in which they are the inevitable victims.
How did this World Cup end up in Qatar, a miserable dictatorship, run by sociopathic oil billionaires, anyway? We all know that FIFA is one of the most corrupt organizations on earth, and it is hardly a reach to presume that the people who run FIFA were massively bribed by these billionaires to locate the World Cup there. It is in fact these same billionaires, with their companions in Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf Oil dictatorships, who are really interested in promoting this violent, malicious propaganda. And here is the reason: Israel is a tiny country of ten million people, located in the middle of the Arab world, which has a population of about 460 million. The World Cup lasted 29 days; during that time the GDP earned by Israel was about $40.6 billion dollars, or somewhat over $4,000 per person. That figure is more than the entire yearly per capita GDP in Palestine, and has been achieved in a modern democracy with equal rights for all people. The residents of Arab countries are reduced to poverty, even though they are awash in colossal amounts of oil money, because their revenue is all stolen by a few thousand people who make up their ruling classes. And these are the same people who spent tens of billions to put on the spectacle of the 2022 World Cup.
In the end, the fight against Israel has nothing to do with Islam or Judaism. These oil dictators cannot have their people looking right into the middle of their world and seeing what a free country can offer them. It must be crushed, because idiotic propaganda like what I have shown above, and even vicious repression, can only work so long, once people learn the truth. The "Palestinian" cause is not the cause of the Palestinian people; it is the cause of a small cadre of vicious tyrants who cannot allow their people to see what life without them would look like.
Comments
(The endless references to "apartheid" are infuriating when Arab citizens in Israel can vote and there are Arab parties in the Knesset, but the slogan probably fools Americans who know very little about what's actually going on in other countries.)
I agree that FIFA should stop holding events like this in countries ruled by medieval oligarchies. It might not stop malevolent kibitzers from making the kind of ridiculous claims that these cartoons reflect, but at least it would avoid the embarrassment of having the venue built by what was basically slave labor.
As to the descendants of refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon, etc, their views are presumably influenced by whatever line the official propaganda in each state takes. It's hard to imagine that much identification with "Palestine" remains after three generations, in any case.
My impression is that the anti-Israel propaganda generated by the Arab regimes has been mostly motivated by a desire to distract their own people from the regimes' own failure to develop their countries more effectively, by focusing attention on an external enemy. I'm not sure how much Israel's democracy factors into it; Turkey was a democracy for decades and the Arab regimes seem to have been able to live with that. It's probably more a matter of traditional anti-Semitism.
As far as being informed about Palestinian public opinion, I can only speak about the people that I knew when I was there. As far as I could tell, they were no more in favor of, say, random knifing or bombing of civilians than any other group of people you are likely to run into.
And lastly, can I say that it is not democracy that is the issue, but rather not being ruled by dictators who steal their nations blind. By the way, as we both know, there are plenty of rulers in so-called democracies who steal their nations blind, just not on the scale that is possible when the dictatorship can be carried out in the open.