from Strategic Culture:
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.
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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.
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