Imagine it is 1953, or 1963, or 1973, or 1983, and an official body of the USSR buys Newcastle United football club, or the Boston Red Sox; or funds entirely the PGA tour of world Golf. Cue speeches and articles apoplectic with rage, justified, as well as hysterical denunciations of the USSR as a place of summary execution, show trials and the Gulag, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, not to mention the lunacy of Central Planning.
Fast forward to 2023 and the Kingdom that produced most of the 9/11 Hi-Jackers, through its sponsorship of Sport, has embarked on a deliberate campaign to lube the arseholes of the sporting world prior to being royally Fucked again, and again, and again.
Public beheadings in Saudi Arabia? Abducting and dismembering Khashoggi? 9/11? So what! is the response of Golf and Football.
A long history of terror that began in the early 20th century when Ibn Said forged an alliance with the legacy of a nutcase called Mohammed ibn al-Wahab (it was his brother who described him as 'mad'), and you have the forerunners of Al-Qaeda, then known as the 'Ikhwan' who rode out of the Nejd to terrorise the Hejaz before seizing control of Mecca, ousting the Hashemites, destroying historic buildings there, and in Medina and Jeddah, a comprehensive destruction of some of the finest vernacular architecture in Arabia that even Mao could not complete in China.
At no point in the last 100 years has anyone who lives there been asked if they want to be ruled by the House of Saud, and if they do complain or agitate, prison or the sword will deal with them. And everyone knows this, inside Saudi Arabia and outside. Will critics of the LIV/PGA partnership end up headless in Riyadh?
Sport has been defiled, it has been dragged into a sewer of corruption, violence and hate, but it seems so obsessed with money are the morally wretched people who manage golf and football and indeed, play it too, that no amount of documentary evidence showing what Saudi Arabia is like, will have an deter them from surrendering the ' Free World's' sporting clubs and organizations to religious monsters who chop people's heads off and regularly threaten governments who complain about them.
What if it was Putin or Kim Jong-Un doing this?
Not so much a sad day, as a day of shame. But what to do? Does anyone have the courage to take on these deranged murderers and ideological freaks, the friends of Jared Kushner, the men who made Trump gush with plaudits because they paid him millions for his yacht, and who knows what else/how much else they have paid him.
No surprises at the venal behaviour of the Trump family, but what about the USA and those 'shared values' we keep hearing about?
All gone into the sewer, swimming in shit-and-blood smeared dollars.
PGA’s ‘merger’ with LIV can’t be seen as anything other than a Saudi victory | Golf | The Guardian
