Month: December 2024

Marc Guehi, captain of the Crystal Palace football club, is in trouble for breaking a law of the game. And, on general principle, I’m not on his side.

Law 4 of the International Football Association Board’s Laws of the Game states: “Equipment must not have any political, religious or personal slogans, statements or images.”

I agree. There is something bone-crushingly tasteless about players using their clothes as a message unrelated to football. Most spectators don’t care about the players’ innermost convictions and an inscription of any kind isn’t going to convert anybody.

It may, however, upset or even enrage some people. After all, most of us regard some messages as offensive, and football fans aren’t known for keeping their feelings to themselves. So why encourage more controversy than that already intrinsic to a football match?

Many supporters threaten – and at times perpetrate – violence to their opposite numbers. A questionable penalty has been known to kick off a mass brawl in the terraces, with broken bottles and razor blades seeing the light of day. Do we really need additional provocations, especially those that have nothing to do with the game?

We don’t. So let’s keep extraneous stuff out of football, the Association is right about that. Hence, though I sympathise with the message Guehi scribbled on his armband, “I love Jesus”, I think he was out of order to choose that particular medium.

He should have kept his beliefs off his rainbow armband… Hold on a moment. A rainbow armband? Surely that qualifies as a political (or even religious) message by itself, even in the absence of any superimposed statements. Doesn’t it? And yet the Premier League demanded that captains must turn armbands into propaganda vehicles for homosexuality as at least an equally valid form of amorous relations.

That’s not all. Last season all players were supposed to genuflect before kick-off to honour a drug-addled American criminal who was accidentally killed when resisting arrest during a robbery bust. Bending a knee is a gesture of obeisance with strong ritual overtones. Call it political or call it cultish, but that rather obscene rite did seem to violate the Association’s own laws.

That would suggest to me, and Mr Guehi, that all bets are off. If celebrating the life of a black criminal is allowed, nay mandated, then a fair argument may be made that, say, white supremacists should be granted equal time. No? Fine. In that case, let’s get rid of both forms of propaganda – or neither.

Now Marc Guehi is facing censure even though he didn’t refuse to wear an armband that clearly goes against his religion. He merely scribbled a very mild implicit rebuttal, correctly believing he was the gander entitled to the same sauce as the goose.

Sam Morsy, Ipswich Town captain, went quite a bit further when upholding his creedal principles. He refused to wear a rainbow armband altogether because it offended his “religious beliefs”. So logically speaking, one would expect him to incur a stiffer punishment than Marc Guehi, who merely added a little ornament by way of dissent.

Yet Morsy won’t be punished at all. You see, the religious beliefs that don’t allow him to exhibit LGBTQ+ livery aren’t Christian. They are Muslim, which makes them protected by another woke piety in conflict with the rainbow-coloured one.

Thus Christianity is denied equal time not only with LGBTQ+ activism but also with Islam and, I’m sure, any other Third World creed. Buddhism, definitely. Animism, probably. Zoroastrianism, why not.

Judaism? Now that’s going too far. You see, it’s not Third World enough, if at all. And, considering Israel’s ill-advised efforts to defend itself against Muslim terrorism, it’s definitely not woke.

Ipswich Town issued a statement, saying: “We proudly support… blah-blah-blah… and stand with the LGBTQ+ community in promoting… blah-blah-blah. At the same time, we respect the decision of our captain Sam Morsy, who has chosen not to wear the rainbow captain’s armband, due to his religious beliefs.” [My emphasis]

Allow me to sum up. Muslim religious beliefs are worthy of respect, and Christian ones aren’t. Islam can somehow be etched into the plaque celebrating propaganda of various perversions, psychiatric disorders, BLM fanaticism, radical feminism and other woke strikes against our civilisation. Christianity, on the other hand, doesn’t belong on that plaque at all – even though it doesn’t advocate throwing homosexuals off tall buildings or committing violence against infidels.

It’s good to know where we stand, and my congratulations to the football authorities for making the lie of the land so abundantly clear. The land is of course strewn with minefields, but let’s not talk about this now.

P.S. For all its rainbow symbolism, the FA has so far failed to persuade homosexual footballers to come out. Only one top player has ever done it and even he committed suicide soon thereafter.

In 1852, John Henry Newman wrote The Idea of a University, an essay explaining exhaustively what his alma mater Oxford and other such institutions were for, what kind of minds they were to train.

Universities, he wrote, should teach students “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.” (Note that the word ‘discriminate’ was used in its proper meaning, exercising discernment). Their primary role was to give students a “perfection of the intellect … the clear, calm, accurate vision and comprehension of all things”.

I haven’t seen any recent mission statements but, by the looks of it, Oxford and our other universities are committed to churning out feral humanoids as bereft of intellect and feeble of mind as they are volatile of temper and devoid of manners.

Evidence for this melancholy observation is served up every day, and yesterday came the turn of the Oxford Union debate on the motion “This house believes Israel is an apartheid state responsible for genocide”.

That the motion passed by 278 votes to 59 was to be expected. Those young firebrands are driven by visceral hatred of Israel because it’s a) Western, b) Jewish, c) opposed to the Third World’s assault on what’s left of our civilisation.

That animus is so powerful that it would nullify any attempts at cerebral activity even if these descendants of Newman were capable of it. But they aren’t. If they were, they’d know that, however much they dislike Israel, it practises neither apartheid nor genocide.

Forget about the ability “to think and to reason and to compare and to discriminate and to analyse.”  These callow yahoos don’t even know the meaning of the words they use.

Thus ‘apartheid’ means institutionalised racial segregation, which manifestly has nothing to do with a country in which Jews, Muslims and Christians coexist in greater harmony than anywhere else in the Middle East. And ‘genocide’ is mass murder by ethnic, racial or religious category – again, not the fate suffered by the non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

A sensible debate can only occur when the parties start from a sensible premise. Since such a premise was lacking, a sensible debate wasn’t on the cards. What was? Oh well, exactly what happened: a show of gonadic, mindless savagery aimed at anyone attempting to introduce a note of sanity into the proceedings.

Students at our formerly great universities are no longer taught how to arrive at a truth by sequential dispassionate steps, each carefully thought through and subjected to destructive testing. They are indoctrinated to believe that they – and all their thoughts – are perfect as they are. Students aren’t equipped with the techniques of honing their minds, expanding their intellects, embarking on a lifelong effort of daily self-improvement.

Such techniques are an inalienable property of an intellectual elite, the kind Newman had in mind. An inability to wield such techniques at every step taken through life is a characteristic of the faceless masses that, according to Ortega y Gasset, have been in revolt for at least two centuries. Well, they are still revolting.

It was Ortega who correctly identified a malignant problem of modernity as the unqualified masses being empowered and encouraged to fill the spaces previously occupied by qualified elites. Anyone seeking an illustration should compare Newman’s idea of a university with the reality of today’s Oxford, supposedly our best.

Instead of the budding scholars they used to be, the intellectual elite in the making, today’s students are shrill, hysterical zealots worshipping at the cult of any subversive ideology on offer. And ideological zealots have no opponents to debate or reason with. They only have enemies to eliminate, ideally physically but, barring that, in any way that will make them mute and invisible.

So yesterday’s debate proved. When broadcaster Jonathan Sacerdoti took issue with the motion, sputum-sputtering hecklers shrieked “genocidal maniac” and “sick mother***er” at him, and threatened violence with the credibility lacking in their thoughts. That Oedipal expletive, by the way, suggests an international nature of the event. Though it’s slowly gaining currency in Britain, it’s still mostly associated with American usage.

And fair enough, people for whom that idiom comes naturally were in attendance. One of them, Israeli-American activist Miko Peled, described the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on 7 October, 2023, as “an act of heroism”. It’s good to see that even at a mature age of 62 Mr Peled retains youthful passions liberally laced with cretinism.

Luckily for him he wasn’t asked to explain, in a logical, detached manner, how murdering and raping (not always in that order) hundreds of unarmed women, men and children fits any accepted definition of heroism.

But his audience didn’t require any explanations – some things just go without saying. When asked if they would have reported Hamas terrorist plans to authorities, thereby preventing the carnage, 77 per cent of the participants said no. And what do you mean, ‘terrorist’?

“What happened on October 7 was not terrorism – these were acts of heroism of a people who were oppressed,” explained Mr Peled to almost universal approval. He then called for “a Palestinian state from the river to the sea”, which is to say for the wholesale murder of the seven million Israeli Jews just like himself (plus any number of non-Jews seen as collaborators). I’m sure that, should such genocide happen, Mr Peled would be cheering from across the ocean.

Young people have always gravitated towards the radical end of things, and they’ve always tended to speak emotionally, often without taking the trouble of thinking first. Nothing new about that.

What is new, however, is our universities’ reluctance and increasing inability to direct youthful passions into the conduit of intellectual rigour and emotional self-restraint. Today, no professor will keep his job for long if he begins to explain to students that – and why – their thoughts are nothing but immature drivel.

That’s why those who’d be inclined to do so seldom become university professors. And if by some chance they do, they have to master the art of subterfuge putting to shame the mediaeval Marranos, Jews who converted to Christianity but continued to practise Judaism in secret.

As a result, we no longer have universities, those Newman would recognise as such. We have hatcheries of crepuscular thought and febrile zealotry. If such is our elite, one has to re-evaluate one’s rating of Mao’s Red Guards.