Gianni Infantino, the president of football’s governing body FIFA, on Friday awarded Trump the newly minted FIFA Peace Prize. As if the spectacle of a sports organisation awarding a peace prize to a world leader were not clownish and tinpot enough, Infantino stretched the absurdity of the spectacle even further with his reasoning for handing the prize to Trump.
“Like everyone here in the room, we see images of war all over the world. And like everyone, we suffer for every child that dies. We cry with every mother that loses someone she loves,” Infantino said without betraying irony. “And we want to see hope. We want to see unity. We want to see a future.”
Infantino then went on to count all the imaginary wars Trump has ended, including in Gaza, where nearly 400 Palestinians have been slaughtered since his supposed Gaza Peace Plan went into effect in October.
“This is what we want from a leader: a leader that cares about the people. We want to live in a safe world, in a safe environment. We want to unite, and that’s what we do here today, and that’s what we want to do at the World Cup,” Infantino said, as he presented the award to Trump.
Infantino then proceeded to twist the knife deeper into the fresh corpses of the Palestinians and to kick the thousands of bodies still buried in the rubble of their homes: “Mr. President, you definitely deserve the first FIFA Peace Prize for your action — for what you have obtained in your way, and you have obtained it in an incredible way.”
Trump covets the Nobel Peace Prize, but the awarding committee in Norway has been pretending that the American president does not deserve it, despite having awarded its totally meaningless gong to famous warmongers and genocide apologists such Kissinger, Rabin, Peres, Obama, Suu Kyi, and more recently, Machado, who has been begging the US to bomb her country.
Infantino saw this as an opportunity to massage the man-child’s ego further by carving out of thin cloth an award about which even FIFA’s own council members had no clue. Instituting an award for Trump will curry favour with him as the United States prepares to co-host FIFA’s flagship World Cup with Mexico and Canada next summer.
Infantino has ignored vigorous appeals and campaigns to ban the Israeli national team and Israeli clubs from participating in its tournaments — a step FIFA took immediately against Russia and Russian clubs within days of the start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022.
However, the Israelis have been exempt from a similar penalty despite live-streaming a genocide in the Gaza Strip for 26 months. During this ongoing genocide, the Israelis have killed more than 800 Palestinian athletes, over half of whom are footballers, including more than 100 child footballers.
The victims of Israeli butchery in Gaza include Suleiman al-Obeid, fondly known as the Palestinian Pele after the Brazilian legend, who was waiting for food at the Israeli-American “aid” sites where death was as commonly distributed as food. Making no distinction between adults and children in their ritual sacrifice of the Palestinians, the Israelis also killed 14-year-old Al-Hilal player Mohammed Ramez Al-Sultan, along with 14 members of his family.
Not only have the Israelis been killing Palestinian footballers with total impunity, but their football “fans” have also been wreaking havoc across Europe during their trips for away games.
In November 2024, before their Europa League match against Ajax, the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv ran amok in the streets of Amsterdam, primarily targeting Muslim and Arab immigrants and tearing down Palestinian flags from shop fronts and balconies of civilian homes in the Dutch capital.
Among the chants of the racist Israelis included one celebrating the slaughter of Palestinian children by the Jewish state: “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.” Having run amok and caused severe damage to public property in Amsterdam, the Israelis were safely sent back home. Months later, Dutch authorities closed cases against Israeli hooligans, saying CCTV footage of their criminality was lost.
Maccabi Tel Aviv continued its journey in the Europa League and faced Norwegian side Bodo/Glimt, whose fans boycotted the Israelis, and the club donated the revenues from the match to Gaza. Maccabi Tel Aviv is back again in Europe this season. Expecting trouble, British police banned away fans before the Israeli side’s match against Birmingham-based Aston Villa last month.
While fans and local police have been taking measures against the racist, violent, and genocidal Israelis, FIFA and UEFA (which governs football in Europe) have been looking the other way.
In Israel, where anti-Arab racism and anti-gentile bigotry is an ideal and a way of life, Maccabi Tel Aviv is not even the most racist club in town. That title belongs to Beitar Jerusalem. Its fans proudly chant, “We are the most racist football team in the country.” Their repertoire of racist chants is quite extensive and includes the quintessential Israeli classic, “May your village burn,” directed at the Palestinians.
Extending its adherence to Jewish exceptionalism further, FIFA refuses to ban even those Israeli clubs which are based out of the occupied West Bank, despite the occupation of those territories itself being deemed illegal under international law. The participation of these clubs is akin to Crimea-based clubs being allowed to play in FIFA’s tournaments, a decision that would create a huge uproar if football’s governing body even hinted towards it.
The Jewish state, however, remains above the law.
The mutual admiration between Infantino and Trump will not whitewash their shameful record in Gaza, however, the spectacle from last night again brought into sharp relief the clown show of a world we are living in.
Before Trump took office for his second term, he was already threatening Palestinians with the opening of the “gates of hell” on them if they did not do his bidding. Soon after entering the Oval Office, he relentlessly bombed Yemen — killing hundreds in the process — to protect the genocidal Israelis from retaliatory Yemeni strikes before hastily agreeing to a ceasefire in May. Trump went on to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites at the behest of the Israelis in June, and has fully backed the Jewish state’s ongoing savagery in Lebanon and Syria. Trump approved an Israeli strike on Doha, the capital city of the US ally Qatar, in September. His administration has killed more than 80 fishermen in Venezuelan waters and is threatening an illegal invasion of the country.
Yet, according to Infantino, Trump deserves his sham peace prize.
Infantino took over the presidency of FIFA in 2015 from Blatter, whose 17-year tenure was marked by corruption, resulting in his eventual ban from the organisation. Blatter himself had succeeded Havelange, another corrupt official, who headed the football governing body for 24 years. After Havelange and Blatter, there was prevailing sentiment that no one could stoop lower. But Infantino has proved everyone wrong.
Palestine has long been the graveyard where the West’s lofty notions about its own self-importance, moral grandstanding, and supposed values have been dying spectacular deaths since the 1880s.
Over the last two years, however, the West has been stripped of whatever little legitimacy its all-encompassing propaganda — pushed through a relentless onslaught of films, music, YouTube videos, algorithmically boosted social media dross, football, and other modern spectacles — still held among those not paying attention.
And no amount of self-congratulatory theatrics among its ruling elite, no matter how slickly packaged for its dwindling audience, can conceal the horrific barbarism and moral nakedness of the Western institutions for much longer. The Gaza genocide has torn away their flimsy cover, and what it has revealed is nothing short of an abomination.
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WHY DIDN'T THEY JUST GIVE THE PEACE PRIZE TO SATANYAHU INSTEAD OF HIS EMPLOYEE?
They punished Russia because it was fighting Zionists and Nazis in Kiev post 2014 maidan coup
Kiev now is no different than ‘Israel’ as a fascist tool for the west.
Russia has a right to defend itself *snark* and the civilians in Donbas Ukraine who have been attacked by the west’s favorite proxies for over a decade.
It just keeps getting worse too Zelenskyy has a stolen home in the West Bank for his “retirement” which I suspect will be much the same retirement package USA handed allies like Hussein and bin Laden.
It all comes back to Nazis and Zionists and it must be ended or it will end the planet