Islam Is a Culture That Kills Excellence. Don't Import It.
For most of the history of the FIFA World Cup, the Arab world has barely been present at it. When they did break through, a win over a serious footballing nation was the rare exception, remembered for years precisely because it was so unusual. This year was supposed to be different. The tournament expanded to forty-eight teams, and a record eight Arab nations qualified, the largest Arab presence the World Cup has ever seen. The results have been the same story. Spain put four past Saudi Arabia, who lost 7-0 a decade ago and are being dismantled again today. Sweden beat Tunisia 5-1, Japan beat them 4-0, and Tunisia were eliminated having conceded eight goals in two matches. Algeria lost 3-0 to Argentina, Messi scoring all three. The lone bright spot is Morocco mainly because twenty-four of their twenty-six players are based abroad, raised, coached, and formed inside European clubs.
The reflex is to blame money, infrastructure, the Jews. Yes, I am not kidding, many videos circulated in Arabic of people explaining how the Jews control FIFA and that is why Arab countries always lose.
I grew up inside that world, Israel was not merely blamed for the wars and the politics. Israel was the explanation for the failure of everything. The economy, the corruption, the broken health system, the broken education system, somewhere behind each one stood the Jew, arranging our humiliation. It was the master key. It unlocked every door, and so no other door ever had to be examined. The failure was never ours. It was done to us.
In a culture organized around that grievance, success becomes the real treason. The moment an Arab country decides to actually walk away from this sad state of affair, to normalize with Israel, to build with the West, to stop performing the role of the eternal victim and start producing something genuine, it is not celebrated. It is attacked. It becomes a Zionist puppet, a traitor, a sellout, bought. Breaking the model of grievance is treated as a crime. Because the grievance is load-bearing. Remove it and the entire architecture of excuse-making collapses.
