Wednesday’s high-profile US-Swiss raids against FIFA leaders set the football world, and by extension most of the world in general, astorm with controversy, and indications are that the arrests were timed to do the most harm to the governing body.
Already, we’re seeing a dramatic shift in focus for the FIFA conference, and the planned vote on suspending Israel for the mistreatment of Palestinian footballers seems almost certain to be delayed.
Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu is crowing about this, and bragged of telling FIFA president Sepp Blatter that a vote of the suspension of Israel would mean the destruction of FIFA outright.
The arrests also seem timed to greatly damage the international profile of the governing body with respect to events as well, with Russia playing host to the next World Cup. Though the US is denying any relation between that and the arrests, they spent much of the period around the Winter Olympics in Sochi harping about Russia, and would love nothing more than to undermine another major, Russia-based event.
Looks to me like the whole thing has been a US/Israel smear campaign with the dual aims of (for the US) taking the hosting of the World Cup from Russia, and (for Israel) creating a distraction which would delay a vote on Israel's membership of FIFA. We live in dangerous times when world level bodies can be toyed with like this. What next? Netanyahu sounds increasingly like one A Hitler from the 1930's.
The Golem strikes again.
There is a variant of warfare now called lawfare. It uses things like this.
It is an international extension of the use of the law to intimidate, such as done by the governments of Singapore and Malaysia.
It undermines law. It de-legitimizes the law. That is not surprising, especially to push the legitimacy of Israel, but it should not be shrugged off when so blatant. And this is blatant.
There had not been any doubt that FIFA leadership has been corrupt. But this seems like there is something else going on. This meme of "taking the world cup from Russia" is silly – it won't happen. So what is the real reason?
Makes sense. Since when is the US, especially an AG during the Obama reign, interested in fighting corruption? That said, there is no doubt whatsoever, that FIFA (like F1, etc) is corrupt to the core and has been for decades.
It's all about israel all the time, and israel's pathetic need to pretend to be holy while at the same time being murderous. Aside from owning the US President, Congress, Pentagon, State, the courts, israel now also owns the clown who pretends to be AG.
Israel is a much more plausible explanation than Russia. In practical terms, there is no way now that FIFA could switch the 2018 Cup from Russia even if it wanted to. Keeping the Cup in Russia will actaully damage Putin more than taking it away. Even assuming that the astrologers are wrong and Putin is still in power in 2018 (he will be 66), it will show ordinary Russians that the problem is Putin, not Russia. Putin himself made a very silly statement claiming that the purpose was inded to have the 2018 Cup withdrawn but since the cause of the arrests was the notorious corruption in FIFA, he was tacitly admitting that Russia had obtained the World Cup by corruption (which, of course, it almost certainly did)! Such a silly mistake suggests that little Vlad is panicking. The reason why the US was able to go after FIFA when no other country was is quite simply because soccer football is not a mass sport in the US as it is in the rest of the world. American soccer seems to be a mainly white and middle class game whereas elsewhere, it's the sport of the masses. Clubs, players and officials are authentic working class heroes and no politician would dare attack them. Thats how the corruption crept in in the first place and I doubt if the US arrests will change anything. FIFA, with the backing of its sponsors, will simply sacrifice anybody that gets caught and things will just go on as before. The amount of money involved is astronomical and thus, FIFA is, to borrow a phrase, too big to fail.