Football, it’s a funny old game. Well, it seems that Iran played South Korea (the good Korea) in Tehran in a World Cup qualifying match¹. It also seems the locals have been informed in normal totalitarian, theocratic fashion that some miserable part of Iran’s (or Persia’s) miserable Muslim history must be acknowledged. And everyone inside Iran must acknowledge it. It is pretty fundamental knowledge to most Westerners (I include ‘good Korea‘ here) that Islam is not just for the believers, but also for the poor, unfortunate unbelievers within its grasp. This still apparently cannot stop an overt imposition of sharia compliance on the South Korean attendees.

Let’s compare this to, let’s say, the inventor of football, England, demanding that all supporters wave the Union Flag, Iran still has pride in its massively dismal culture since Islam took over its once proud history; England does not. And they enforce that culture and history, however pathetic, evil, distorted and irrelevant, with many of its inhabitants only too eager to police those who do not submit to their “request”.

It seems we in the West are incapable of such basic instincts any more, and anyone who displays these instincts are usually deemed near-criminal if not actually criminal (like a flag-waving Englander). The proud barbarians indeed have no truck with being dismissive or shy about any part of their culture or history, while we in the West continue to snivel and pout and apologize. And our media, promoting and even demanding the same illness, have no problem with this incongruity: the BBC makes no bones that we must know this is a ‘holy day‘. What, like Christmas in England? Yeah, right. But if we continue to pout, we deserve pathetic cultures becoming actually supremacist above our own far superior culture in a very cheap way.

¹ BBC; ‘Iran beat South Korea as game is played on a holy day in Tehran‘