FUK THE SAUDIS AND ALL THEIR BOUGHT MONEY WHORES!
Joining up with the Saudis (and taking their money) might require jumping through some moral hoops, but Mickelson, ironically, is the only golfer to talk so openly about the Saudi government’s shady history of human-rights abuses. LPGA golfers have played Saudi events and received decidedly less criticism for it. Golf is not the only target here, either. The Saudi Cup has become horse racing’s most lucrative event, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the famously amoral WWE has been working with the Saudi government for years and held its “Crown Jewel” event in the country just days after Khashoggi’s murder. But the Saudi government’s sportswashing experiment has found its biggest success in golf, where it could flash around its insane money to the exact players most amenable to taking it.
Endless Saudi Money Throws Golf Into an Existential Crisis
There is perhaps no sport more designed for self-interest than golf. It is the opposite of a team sport. Even in tennis, you have someone to hit the ball back to you. In golf, you are alone with your thoughts, responsible only for what you do, success or failure riding solely on your own actions. To thrive as a professional requires believing in yourself — and yourself only. All golfers think of themselves as rugged individualists, even if they’re all wearing the same polos and plaid pants.
It is in this context that the Saudi Arabian government, using its sovereign wealth fund, created LIV Golf and plunged the sport into absolute chaos. The PGA Tour has been the governing arm and organizing principle of the golf world for decades, but it, unlike the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB, or most other professional sports leagues, doesn’t have a union. The players are independent contractors, usually paying their own way to events. And that has left it vulnerable to exactly what is happening now. The Saudis are blowing up the world of golf, and those rugged-individualist American golfers are giddily helping them push the plunger.
To get you up to speed, LIV Golf is having its first event this weekend, outside London, featuring top golfers like Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson, and Bryson DeChambeau. Those three, along with every other golfer taking part, have all been kicked off the PGA Tour, purportedly for good. It has led to golf — a sport that was already losing relevance and market share, which was another reason the Saudi government targeted the sport — to face its biggest existential crisis in decades.
LIV Golf ostensibly claims to be an alternative to the PGA. It even has its own very (strange) slogan: “Golf, but louder.” (Fans still have to be quiet when golfers are in their backswing on the LIV Golf tour.) But what all of this really is a way for Saudi Arabia to launder its less-than-stellar reputation through sports, also known as sportswashing. And the quickest way to do that is to spend ungodly amounts of money and hope no one worries too much — or even cares — about where that money comes from. The LIV Golf tour is offering a jaw-dropping $255 million in prize money over its eight events this year; the Masters, the PGA’s jewel event, gave out $15 million last year, the largest amount it ever as, and it’s not even close to what each of the LIV events are offering.
Enter golfers — and, specifically, Phil Mickelson. Mickelson has long been the sport’s most self-aggrandizing iconoclast, a famously degenerate gambler (he once lost $40 million gambling over a five-year stretch) and smarmy self-promoter who was always just chatty enough with reporters and irresistibly self-destructive that you couldn’t take your eyes off him. (That he’s still a top-tier golfer, at the age of 51, doesn’t hurt either; last year he became the oldest man to ever win a major when he finished first at the PGA Championship.) Mickelson stands out, even in a sport where people are only out for themselves, as the guy who’s the most out for himself. He was one of the first players to sign up for the LIV Tour, but, because he’s Phil Mickelson, he couldn’t shut his mouth about it. And so he told his biographer Alan Shipnuck that he was joining Saudi Arabia’s new tour even though “they killed [Washington Post reporter and U.S. resident Jamal] Khashoggi and have a horrible record on human rights” and “execute people over there for being gay.” (Mickelson has paid Shipnuck back for accurately quoting him by kicking him out of his press conferences.) The reason Mickelson joined up was, of course, the money: reportedly $200 million for him alone to switch, which will take care of a lot of busted parlays. The Saudis have made him the face of the offshoot tour, and Mickelson obliged to the point that, on the first day of the first event, he wore a Masters vest with the logo blacked out.
Most golfers, including Tiger Woods (who reportedly turned down a “high-nine-figure” offer to join the LIV tour), are sticking with the PGA Tour — which is hardly some blameless organization being preyed upon by the big bad Saudis. Their monopoly on golf has led to policies — like the ones where players all have to pay their own way to every event — that have angered golfers for years. The desire for competition was one of the things Mickelson said drew him to the LIV Tour in the first place. (He actually told Shipnuck, “I’m not sure I even want them to succeed.” He has since presumably changed his mind.)
Joining up with the Saudis (and taking their money) might require jumping through some moral hoops, but Mickelson, ironically, is the only golfer to talk so openly about the Saudi government’s shady history of human-rights abuses. LPGA golfers have played Saudi events and received decidedly less criticism for it. Golf is not the only target here, either. The Saudi Cup has become horse racing’s most lucrative event, and, perhaps not surprisingly, the famously amoral WWE has been working with the Saudi government for years and held its “Crown Jewel” event in the country just days after Khashoggi’s murder. But the Saudi government’s sportswashing experiment has found its biggest success in golf, where it could flash around its insane money to the exact players most amenable to taking it.
It’s worth remembering too that while the NBA and other American sports leagues have resisted Saudi money so far, they are plenty flexible on this sort of stuff when it suits them. The NBA is playing two exhibition games next year in the United Arab Emirates, where homosexuality is a crime punishable by death. These problematic partnerships, I’m sad to say, will probably soon be par for every sport’s course. After all, the only golfer to explicitly call out the Saudi government for its brutality did so while explaining why he was taking their money anyway. Sports are like any other business: They’re going to go where the money is. Right now, the Saudi government is throwing around absurd amounts of cash to any professional athlete who will hold out their hand. Golfers, wrestlers, and racehorse owners appear to have had the most eagerness to go first. They will not be the last.
Biden Says He Has ‘Not Yet’ Decided on Visiting Saudi Arabia – Then Says He Is Going
(CNSNews.com) – President Biden said on Sunday that he has “not yet” decided if he will visit Saudi Arabia when he’s in the region next month – but then moments later said that he was going, tying the visit to security, including that of Israel, rather than to energy issues.
Biden was speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, and he may have misheard the initial question over the engine noise.
Whatever the case, he disclosed that he was going to Saudi Arabia for “a larger meeting taking place” in the kingdom, which he said “has to do with national security for them – for Israelis.”
“Have you decided, sir, whether to go to Saudi Arabia?” a reporter asked.
“No, not yet,” Biden replied.
Asked if he was waiting for commitments from the Saudis, he said, “No, no, the commitments from the Saudis don’t relate to anything having to do with energy. It happens to be a larger meeting taking place in Saudi Arabia. That’s the reason I’m going.”
“And it has to do with national security for them – for Israelis,” Biden continued.
“I have a program –” he said, then stopped. “Anyway, it has to do with much larger issues than having to do with the energy piece.”
A National Security Council spokesperson told media outlets that Biden’s planned trip to the region “comes in the context of a significant agenda with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the other countries of the Middle East.”
“That agenda is focused on delivering results for the American people as well as ending wars and leading through diplomacy to bring stability to the Middle East region,” the spokesperson said.
Israeli officials have spoken about Biden visiting Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas around July 14-15, and it’s assumed the trip to Saudi Arabia would take place on either side of that.
Saudi Arabia is the world’s second largest oil producer, and preparations for the visit come amid record-high gas prices. Biden’s comments on Sunday seemed to downplay the expectation that he would use a visit to press Riyadh to increase oil production.
As Biden flew to Los Angeles last week for the Summit of the Americas, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said he had no news to report on a possible visit to Saudi Arabia.
“I’ll only say the president is going to travel to places and meet with people with whom he wants to work to help solve problems for the American people,” he said then.
Under the Trump’s administration’s historic “Abraham Accords,” Israel normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco over the course of four months.
When the UAE, Bahrain, and Israel signed the accords at the White House in September 2020, President Trump held out the possibility that Saudi Arabia would join, “at the right time.”
Any initiative that expanded the circle of regional normalization to incorporate the kingdom would be a momentous shift, given its status as “custodian of the two holy mosques” in Mecca and Medina, the most revered sites in Islam.
At the same time, however, controversy persists over Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s suspected role in the killing of the self-exiled Saudi writer Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi government and royal family, was slain and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The U.S. Senate in a bipartisan resolution two months later declared that the heir to the Saudi throne was “responsible for the murder.”
While campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden pledged to shun Saudi Arabia, saying during a 2019 debate that as president he would “make them pay the price [for the Khashoggi murder] and make them in fact the pariah that they are.”
In February last year, the Director of National Intelligence released a declassified version of an intelligence report that concluded that Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation that resulted in Khashoggi’s murder.
The administration then announced the “Khashoggi ban,” a policy of restricting visas for “individuals who, acting on behalf of a foreign government, are believed to have been directly engaged in serious, extraterritorial counter-dissident activities.”
Fielding questions last week on a possible Biden visit to Saudi Arabia, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre referred both to the administration’s response to the killing – the report’s release and “Khashoggi ban” – and to its view of the importance of engaging the kingdom on other issues, such as the need to resolve the drawn-out conflict in Yemen.
The detailed plan that Mohammad sketched out for his attack has just been released; it “included putting on a balaclava at 7:45 a.m. and saying ‘in the name of Allah’ before stepping into his classroom and ordering students to use zip-ties he provided to bind their hands. Mohammad also planned to make a fake 911 distress call to report a suicidal guy [sic; this is how they write at AP these days] and wait for police outside the classroom before ambushing from behind ‘and slit calmly yet forcefully one of the officers with guns.’”
Nigeria Blames Islamic State for Catholic Church Massacre
Nigeria’s federal government said on Thursday it suspects members of the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) terror group were responsible for a massacre at a Catholic church in southern Nigeria on Sunday that killed 40 people, Reuters reported.
“We have been able to see the footprint of ISWAP in the horrendous attack in Owo and we are after them. Our security agencies are on their trail and we will bring them to justice,” Nigerian Interior Minister Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola told reporters on June 9 in Nigeria’s national capital of Abuja.
An unknown number of armed men attacked worshippers of St. Francis Catholic Church in Owo, Ondo State, on June 5 as they attended a Sunday morning service. The gunmen additionally detonated an unspecified number of bombs in or near the church, according to Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper
Ondo State Governor Arakunrin Akeredolu told Reuters on June 9 that “a total of 127 people had been affected by the attack in the church, of whom 40 had died, 61 were still in hospital and 26 had been discharged.”
Reuters had previously quoted local doctors as saying at least 50 people were killed during the incident. Those casualty figures were unofficial, however.
Owo is located in southwestern Nigeria’s Ondo State. The region typically witnesses fewer Islamic terror attacks than Nigeria’s northeast, where jihadists have led a violent Islamic insurgency for over a decade.
Men carry the bodies during a burial prayer held in Ngala, on December 15, 2019, of the 19 cattle herders that were gunned down by Boko Haram jihadists outside the Fuhe village, near Ngala, on December 14, 2019. (AUDU MARTE/AFP via Getty Images)
ISWAP is the formal name for Boko Haram, a jihadist terror group founded in northeastern Nigeria in 2009. Boko Haram renamed itself ISWAP in 2015 after pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was then the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Nigerian government officials claimed that a dissident branch of Boko Haram continued to exist after the group changed its name and allegiance to Islamic State. Abuja insisted on the existence of this alleged branch so that it could later claim to have vanquished the supposed offshoot and blame subsequent terror attacks on ISWAP, according to some observers. Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari often cites this premise when attempting to claim credit for allegedly “defeating” Boko Haram, though he has yet to provide proof supporting the assertion.
ISWAP claimed responsibility for two separate terror attacks in Nigeria in April: a bombing in northeastern Tabara state (on April 22) and a fatal police station shootout in central Kogi state (on April 23).
“A total of 6,006 Christians in Nigeria were hacked to death from January 2021 to March 2022, a recent investigation has established, noting that the number has doubled in recent years,” the Associated for Catholic Information in Africa (ACI AFRICA) reported on April 23.
Citing an April 5 report by the International Society for Civil Liberties and Rule of Law (Intersociety), ACI AFRICA noted that “in three months (January to March 2022) alone, more than 900 Christians were killed by Boko Haram militants and armed Fulani herdsmen [jihadist terrorists].”
