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First Word
On Tournament Of Ironies
The World Cup has just concluded, that four yearly global event that turns the whole world into a frenzied extravaganza of chaotic spectator spectacle all in the name of supporting their teams in the ultimate contest of the beautiful game.
The FIFA motto that‘ Football Unites the World’ is an interesting slogan for a game that seems to elicit nationalistic passions of the highest order with players and devotees pitting against each other on the pitch, in the stands and on the streets with equal zeal.
The inaugural World Cup was in 1930 and it has been played every four years since except in 1942 following the outbreak of World War II in 1939 and in 1946 since the world was recovering from the devastation of the war that had ended in 1945.
This year, the World Cup, co-hosted by USA, Canada and Mexico had a new twist in that FIFA decided to expand and strengthen their international goodwill reach and create a FIFA Peace Prize for the very first time since inception.
The citation, according to FIFA, was that it was established as an annual honor to recognize individuals who take extraordinary actions to promote peace, resolve conflicts and unite people globally. A very noble and honorable objective.
FIFA’ s position was that since soccer connects over five billion people, it has a responsibility to use its global platform to promote diplomacy, harmony and hope in an increasingly divided world that is in need of heroes of hope.
Unfortunately for FIFA and the world was the fact that the first recipient is Trump, and even if FIFA was to attempt a hundred times to‘ Soccerwash’ Trump, they could not have awarded it to a more divisive character in the entire world.
Trump negates every single objective that FIFA wanted to project to the world and in the final analysis it perhaps would have been better not to have created an award that has now left the FIFA reputation in shreds.
As the award was being given, Trump was wagging an unpopular and unprovoked war with Iran, launched with USA’ s vassal state, Israel. Ironically Iran qualified for the World Cup and a diplomatic impasse ensued as to how Iran would be hosted in a technically hostile country.
The war has caused unnecessary financial hardships to Americans and destabilized the global economy by attack ing the nerve center of the global oil trade. This definitely is not what FIFA had in mind when they set up the award.
The award becomes a total farce when one takes into consideration the existing tensions the US has with its
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