August 2, 2024
The Paris Summer
Olympic Games opened last Friday to a global controversy with the organizers
accused of offending billions of Christians and Muslims around the world
through profane depictions of Jesus Christ (a revered prophet in Islam)
surrounded by drag queens.
It wasn’t just
the alleged scurrilous debasement of Da Vinci’s iconic Last Supper tableau. The
entire opening ceremony of the XXXIII Olympiad was a kitsch spectacle that
seemed to be reduced to a tawdry Gay Pride event. The Paris 2024 organizers
claimed that the theme was meant to convey “inclusiveness” and humanitarian
tolerance – although, indicative of fault, they later offered a groveling
apology for offending.
The controversy
continued during the first week of sporting events when the triathlon swimming
in the Seine River was initially canceled due to dangerous pollution levels and
then ordered to go ahead despite concerns for the safety of participants. Athletes
complained that they were forced to swim through sewage and rat-infested waters
so that the French organizers would not lose face over a public relations
disaster.
The pollution
fiasco could serve as a metaphor for how Western elitist politicians have lost
the plot on the realities of today’s world. No amount of fancy French perfumery
can hide the stink behind the cheap politicization of the Games.
After spending
over $1.5 billion on purportedly cleaning it up, the Seine is as toxic from
contamination as it ever was since public bathing was banned in the river a
century ago.
Western politics
has likewise become a deceitful charade and parody of liberalism. No amount of
whitewashing can conceal the burgeoning detritus of lies and corruption
emanating from Western capitals. On the one hand, politicians talk about the
lofty values of democracy and rules-based order, while on the other hand, they
drop bombs on civilians with rainbow flags painted on the warheads. Or they
sponsor NeoNazi killers in Ukraine wearing Gay Pride logos.
Uniting humanity
through sports is supposed to be the Olympian principle of the modern Games
which first took place in 1896 in Greece as conceived by Frenchman Pierre de
Coubertin. Over the decades, the world’s foremost sporting event has been
disrupted by wars and geopolitics, especially during the Cold War years when
the Games were boycotted in 1980 and 1984. Despite the vagaries over the years,
there was always a semblance of neutrality in international politics.
Not anymore. The
current Paris Olympics have become flagrantly politicized. Russia and Belarus
have been banned due to the conflict in Ukraine after the Western-dominated
International Olympic Committee declared “solidarity with Ukraine”.
This is an
absolute disgrace for the IOC and the Games. The hypocrisy is putrid. Never was
it considered to ban the United States and its NATO allies over the many
illegal wars that they engaged in, from the invasion and occupation of Iraq and
Afghanistan, among other aggressions.
Arguably, the
war in Ukraine is a proxy war waged by the U.S. and its NATO allies against
Russia. The history of the conflict points to Western responsibility and
calculated provocation. To define the conflict as solely down to “Russian
aggression” is a dubious political position, one that the West promulgates but
which is not shared by many other nations.
It is an abuse
of its credentials for the IOC to adopt a partisan position on the Ukraine war.
The double
standard is brazen when one considers that Israel is free to send its national
delegation to the Olympics without any official reservations. Yet the
International Court of Justice has ruled Israel’s conduct of hostilities in
Gaza constitutes a genocide. It is a sordid spectacle when Israeli athletes are
afforded untrammeled participation while their state has killed over 40,000
Palestinians, mainly women and children, during the past nine months of
unrelenting violence. Western capitals have given the Israeli regime diplomatic
cover and vital military support to conduct this genocide. The horrendous
massacres in Gaza from refugee camps being blown up and whole families
slaughtered in cold blood continue unabated while the Games are televised around
the world.
The
juxtaposition of this Western-enabled barbarism in Gaza amid Games that
champion “diversity and tolerance” is too sickening and perverse for words.
Indeed, one could say without any equivocation that the Paris Olympics are
morally depraved given the abomination of mass murder in Gaza.
That the
organizers of the Paris event seek to cover their proceedings with a veneer of
supposedly sophisticated inclusion and humanitarianism is doubly obscene. The
moral decadence is manifest in the blasphemous insults towards religious
beliefs. Nothing is sacred, it seems, except Western notions of elitism.
Criticism is not permitted without incurring petulant accusations of bigotry
and ‘Transphobia”.
French President
Emmanuel Macron has boasted about the Paris Games being a “crazy idea being
made real”. One can say that again, with absolute contempt.
Macron and other
Western political leaders are encumbered with narcissistic notions that they
represent noble values of “liberal democracy”.
This is while
Macron and his Western cohorts have recklessly fueled the slaughter in Ukraine
and Gaza. Then they have the gall to ban Russia and Belarus from the Games.
The edifying
concept of the Olympics has been debased to a gaudy propaganda show aimed at
promoting pretensions of Western virtue.
However, the
reality is that this is not a demonstration of supposed tolerance and
inclusivity but rather an imposition of twisted Western elite ideology on the
majority of humanity.
One might argue
the toss about whether the offense against Christianity and Islam was an
unfortunate mistaken interpretation of French artistic license.
But what is
inarguable is the heinous hypocrisy demonstrated over the Western-enabled
genocide in Gaza and the sanctioning of Russia over Ukraine.
No wonder many
people around the world have lost the usual interest in the “Jeux Olympiques”.
The Paris event has alienated much of the planet because of its cheap and dirty
politicization.
The stink
emerging from the River Seine – possibly the world’s biggest open sewer – is
the groaning reality dump on Western duplicity and pretensions.
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