NATO injects politics into sport at every opportunity: to NATO, sport is not only a big business but a very dirty, ruthless and lucrative business, Declan Hayes writes.
Although NATO’s blockade of Russia meant she could not have attended Wimbledon even had she wanted to, I doubt Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova would have enjoyed it.
Zakharova, if her recent pronouncements on NATO’s blockade of Russian sport and, even more outrageously on that of Belarus are anything to go by, is of the old school where one does not cheer or applaud a double fault but, in traditionally true British fashion, keeps a stiff and fair-minded upper lip.
By contrast, Albion’s present Wimbledon lot, egged on by MI5’s BBC, get their rocks off booing 20 year-old Belarusian women for no other reason than they were born in Belarus.
These are the same English savages who drown out the haka of Tonga (population 100,000) and whose football fans would be a national embarrassment if today’s British sports influencers did embarrassment. As would the forelock-tipping Irish, who have long forsaken the good manners they once displayed with Munster’s legendary haka clashes against the All Blacks.
Because I too am of the old school, I was happy for Serbians that their own Novak Djokovic almost prevailed in the men’s final, just as I was happy that Syria’s football team had a modestly successful run against the odds some years ago and that Syrians and Gazans prevailed in Arab song contests.
Because everyone, even Serbs, deserves to enjoy the sunny side of the street every once in a while, that and that alone is why I am happy Djokovic, whom the tennis-loving French saw was a real a stand-up guy, has done so well, even if he fell at Wimbledon’s last hurdle this time.
The Serbs, as Zakharova knows and as many of Stephen Karganovic’s excellent articles regularly remind us, were subjected to non-stop NATO saturation bombing by Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the two most notorious Class A war criminals of Djokovic’s childhood. And that vindictive NATO terrorism continues against Serbia’s children to this very day.