World Athletics has banned Russian athletes because of their murderous president, yet for two decades has hosted meets in Qatar, a den for Hamas terrorists, and lets Israelis compete
Not that we should expect better from a governing body that let men race as women for years in a perennially drug-laced, greed-powered sporting enterprise
World Athletics is the global governing body for the track and field, and the organization’s president is an elitist bag of limey piss named Sebastian Coe, whose deeply depraved conduct at the WA helm has bunted his considerable athletic achievements into forgettability.
WA banned Russian and Belarussian athletes from this year’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest owing to a proxy war in Ukraine and Russia. This war was openly and systematically provoked by the United States and NATO generally, and Coe’s decision opposed the stance of the International Olympic Committee and a host of national athletics governing bodies. But let’s pretend for the moment Coe’s ruling was completely sound. This would require it to be applied consistently and in every instance of an undeniable human-rights violation by a national government.
I suggested three months ago, in advance of the World Championships, that this rule was in fact not being applied consistently.
Recent tumult in the Middle East has thrown the hypocrisy of World Athletics into even greater relief, although the organization’s haphazard and hapless conduct in other areas under Coe’s leadership renders all of this unsurprising.
“Athletics will not be on the wrong side of history," Coe insisted to reporters on July 31 concerning his decision about Russia and Belarus. This is straight from the mouth of someone who has repeatedly and emphatically planted himself firmly on the wrong side of history since assuming his post in August 2015.
Coe was already World Athletics vice president when non-female Caster Semenya embarked on a decade-long inglorious-yet-celebrated stint in women’s athletics that saw Semenya steal five global gold medals in the 800 meters from women. And Coe was president when non-female Francine Niyonsaba was credited with breaking the women’s world record in the 2,000 meters by 3.6 seconds in 2021, when Niyonsaba also won the Diamond League women’s 5000-meter crown. That he later leaped to take credit for rule changes banning nonwomen from the top levels of a sport is a livid joke, because he hasn’t commented on the fact that the names of Semenya, Niyonsaba, and other non-women continue to pepper the all-time World Athletics women’s performance lists.
But we’ll give Coe a pass here by assuming he’s just a bloated, cigar-puffing, Davos-associated goober who knows nothing about human biology and needs to be told exactly what do to by people smarter than he is in every situation requiring a meaningful decision—except when it comes to deciding what nations have immoral leaders. Let’s pretend this moron is actually on the ball in this one area.
Without getting into the exaggerations and outright lies about the attack the terrorist organization Hamas perpetrated on Israeli citizens on October 7, or the fact that Israel clearly knew it was coming, this was a decisively and purposefully brutal and dehumanizing attack. And Hamas has long made it clear that its primary mission is to wipe out Israeli Jews and reclaim what they consider to be the Palestinians’ rightful homeland.
In the wake of the attack, the leadership of Hamas, properly understanding that the Gaza Strip and its 100-percent Palestinian population were about to be annihilated, reportedly holed up in Doha, the capital of Qatar. In fact, the U.S. Government has had a curiously cozy relationship with Qatar despite that nation being among the Middle Eastern states openly supporting Hamas in it quest to erase Israel from the map.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government continues to sell out its own citizens while endangering American Jews and American Palestinians and announcing that it views Palestinians in precisely the same terms the Nazis view Jews, if not worse; as the Israelis have been perpetrating massive human-rights violations since the country’s dubious inception by antisemitic Zionists, the ones they’re perpetrating now seem like an afterthought compared to some of the recent rhetoric.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has tweeted images of high-rise apartment buildings in Gaza leveled by Israeli airstrikes. “We are fighting against human animals,” declared Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declared while announcing that the Gaza would be deprived of water and electricity. The country’s president, Isaac Herzog, has declared all Palestinians to be guilty of the sins of terrorists and laughed the whole notion of civilian non-combatants off the table.
All three men deserve nothing less than the gallows. In the worst imaginable way, it looks pretty funny from here to watch two different tribes of people who look remarkably alike on the surface spend thousands of years trying to eliminate each other fundamentally because they hold to different supernatural precepts.
War-drunk U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken decided to travel to the Middle East last week. (Blinken said he was doing so “as a Jew.” Try to imagine the clamor that would erupt if the U.S. Secretary of State were an Arab-American and stated under the exact same conditions that he was headed to Israel “as a Muslim.”) As that article in The Dossier describes, when Blinken was in Qatar, he managed to not bring up the fact that Hamas leaders were lurking nearby.
Blinken briefly appeared so buoyed by his meeting with subhuman animals that he floated the idea of a cease-fire. But only briefly.
Doha has hosted a Diamond League athletics meet almost every year since 1997. The World Athletics Championships were held there in 2019, with the event perceived as a failure on multiple fronts.
How is it that Sebastian Coe can not merely ban Russian citizen-athletes but double down on this ban on the basis of inhumane leadership, yet allow high-profile meets and even global championships to unfold in a known terrorist haven?
We all know the reason: “Lord” Sebastian Coe should be formally addressed as “Whore” Sebastian Coe. This is the same reason the Chinese company Wanda is the title sponsor of the Diamond League. Coe has no principles whatsoever. And all of this makes it easy to rationalize why Ethiopian athletes, who currently dominate long-distance running along with Kenyans, are simply never drug-tested. Coe has decided that this would interfere with the flow of world records and revenue for himself (and for “his” organization).
And on the whole “Lord” thing, we* need to dispose of that whole game anyway. People can run around Britain addressing creepy old authoritarians as Dames and Princes and conferring distinctly unearned honors on them if they must, but I bet they wish they didn’t have to. One of these authoritarian assholes recently wrote a flurry of letters to every tech platform in existence demanding that Russell Brand be removed. This woman and others like her deserve to be addressed in pure saloon language. I don’t know if this was ever legal in England, but it certainly is here. I can’t wait for “King” Charles to perish just to see if they need two extra coffins to lug those huge Howdy Doody ears around.
On the matter of free speech, I have plenty more to say, as the violence in the Middle East has been purposefully deployed as an opportunity to erode even more of it by forcing Americans to choose the one correct side. But that topic will require at least one stand-alone post in itself. For now, I’ll just say that I’m disappointed, but not surprised, by the number of pundits and politicians who have blared about the need for untrammeled free speech in recent years who are now in favor of censoring anti-Israel or pro-Palestine viewpoints. Either none of these game but fallen humans understands that this is precisely the time to allow open dialogue, or none of them ever legitimately cared about free speech in the first place.