The Culture of Loserdom

Tablet ^ | 10 Jul, 2926 | Lee Smith

[MtnClimber]

How the Egyptians and their fans—including NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani—turned their World Cup collapse into a master class in third-world resentment.

The lamentations along the Nile for Egypt’s World Cup loss to defending champion Argentina have echoed far and wide, reaching even the East River, where Gracie Mansion tenant and Gotham’s number one soccer fan Zohran Mamdani says the Golden Pharaohs were robbed. But they weren’t robbed. They choked. Egypt’s defeat will go down as one of the biggest chokes in sports history, the international football version of Egypt’s 1948 failure, along with four other Arab armies, to make good on their vicious threats to destroy the nascent Jewish state.

And thus, instead of tiptoeing out of the spotlight to nurse the self-inflicted damage done to their egos in the wake of soccer nakba, the Egyptians and their fans have, characteristically, used their disastrous showing to showcase the purest expression of the worst Middle Eastern sensibilities—self-pity, paranoia, and unbridled rage—on the grandest possible stage.

The contention that Egypt was robbed is based on three incidents. First, a goal scored in the 58th minute was called back after referee François Letexier reviewed footage provided by the video assistant referee that showed Egypt had committed a foul, albeit far from where the goal was eventually scored.

There have been lots of complaints this year about the VAR, most prominently from President Donald Trump after a VAR review led to U.S. player Folarin Balogun’s red card, later overturned by World Cup officials. The call against the Egyptians was controversial, but they nonetheless added another goal in the 67th minute to put them ahead 2-0. It looked like an upset was in the making. Yes, Saudi Arabia won a shocking victory over Argentina in the 2022 World Cup, but that was in the group stage, and this was a knockout-round contest. But then the reigning champions roared back.

Argentina got on the board in the 79th minute of the match, and four minutes later, Lionel Messi scored the equalizer. The next disputed incidents came as Egypt pushed into Argentina’s penalty box with the clock running down. An Argentine midfielder pulled on the jersey of an Egyptian player who didn’t have the ball, while another Argentine defender stripped the ball from an Egyptian attacker who went to the ground. The Egyptians claimed that a foul should have been called on the jersey puller and a penalty on the ball stripper that would have given the African team a chance to go ahead. Instead, the referee allowed play to continue, Argentina won the ball, mounted a counteroffensive, and scored the game-winning goal. And then bedlam.

Losing a 3-2 game against the world champions is nothing to be ashamed of, especially after an impressive run through the earlier stages that gained Egypt its place in the final 16 teams. But giving up three goals in 14 minutes to anyone is failure on an epic scale that represents not only a lack of discipline, never mind a defensive strategy, but also—and more crucially—a lack of heart: that is, courage. Without taking anything away from Argentina’s come-from-behind victory, a collapse like Egypt’s is a manifestation of a collective will, against nearly incalculable odds, to lose. And thus began the downward spiral of loserdom, a phenomenon of nature as familiar to Egypt as the khamsin wind.

After Messi’s goal, Egyptian coach Hossam Hassan crossed his arms over his head to make an X, a sign designed by world soccer’s governing body, FIFA, to report discrimination on the field or, more typically, from fans, like European football supporters who regularly taunt African players. So where was the racism in Tuesday’s World Cup game played in Atlanta, what African Americans often call Black Mecca? It was in the heart of everyone who was against Egypt, including Messi, whom Hassan yelled at, and the fans, whom Hassan spat at. It was in the lens of the photographer whom Hassan wanted to fight after the loss. All the world had ganged up on Egypt. Why? Because of Palestine. Hassan had proudly unfurled the Palestinian flag after an earlier World Cup game, and the Zionist gangs that control the world, and the world’s game, couldn’t allow that.

Is it just a coincidence, asks Egyptian funnyman Bassem Youssef, that the Egyptian aid worker who organized World Cup watch parties in Gaza was killed by an Israeli strike in the Palestinian territory three minutes after the game started? Egypt lost to Zionism, say Egyptian fans. “Maybe he has something to hide,” Hassan said of the French referee who “robbed” Egypt. “Whoever has something to hide sometimes fails to hide what he is hiding, and this was exactly what I felt during that conversation.” What did he fail to hide? That he is a Jew—in fact, an Orthodox Jew, according to the Egypt fans who rewrote Letexier’s Wikipedia page to support the conspiratorial fabrication.

“What I told the referee is that ‘this is unfair,’” said Hassan. But he often complains about “unfairness” when he loses, as he did when he blamed the officiating after Egypt lost in the African Cup of Nations last year to Senegal, hardly a stronghold of Zionist power. In 2016, Egyptian authorities arrested him for attacking a photographer on the field. Last week, Hassan’s twin brother and team director, Ibrahim, scuffled with Dallas police at the team’s hotel.

So, it doesn’t really have anything to do with the Palestinians because the core problem is the coach and his team and its supporters, right? No. It’s all about the Palestinians because they are the world champions of losing, entitled and privileged and maniacally violent losers. Hassan sides with the Palestinians because he is a loser. Game respects game.

An apparent exception to Egypt’s culture of losers is Mohamed Salah, the Egyptian captain who embraced Messi after the game and claimed responsibility for losing the ball that led to Argentina’s game-winning goal. The 34-year-old former Liverpool star has spent much of his career in England, from where he posts pictures of his daughters. And because they’re not veiled, Salah is routinely reproached by Egypt supporters.

Thus, he can hardly be surprised by his countrymen’s grotesque outburst, for what is considered bizarre or freakish anywhere else in the world is, as they say in Egypt, normal in Egypt. The reality is that the country on the Nile is on a very long losing streak, dating back long before soccer was invented. Thousands of years ago, Egypt was once a dominant empire and a thriving, productive civilization, and then it fell and kept falling.

In 525 BCE, the Persians defeated Egypt and made it part of their empire. In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great took it from Persia, and after his death his general Ptolemy I Soter gave rise to a Greek-speaking Macedonian dynasty, the Ptolemies. They ruled Egypt until 31 BC, when Augustus defeated Cleopatra, the last Ptolemy ruler, and her lover Marc Antony at the Battle of Actium. Egypt became part of the Byzantine empire until the seventh century CE, when it was overrun by Arab Muslim armies that forced their language and religion on the conquered.

In 1517, the Ottomans absorbed Egypt, and in 1882 it was occupied by Great Britain. Even after formal independence in 1922, London continued to play a major role in defense and foreign policy through World War II. In 1948, Egypt unwisely made war against the newly founded Israel, and the defeat discredited King Farouk, who was overthrown in 1952 by a group of young army officers, known as the Free Officers, led by Gamal Abdel Nasser.

The United States saved Egypt from a humiliating defeat in 1956, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered French, British, and Israeli forces to evacuate the Suez Canal, which they’d easily taken from Egyptian forces. But not even Nasser’s Soviet patrons could save him in 1967, when Israel destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, seized Sinai, and remade the Middle East in six days. His successor Anwar Sadat lost the 1973 war when Ariel Sharon nearly encircled Cairo and only Henry Kissinger’s intervention stopped him.

And then Sadat turned it around, briefly. He won a Nobel prize for making peace with Israel, got back the Sinai—and then terrorists killed him for it. The country’s only other Nobel prize winner, novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in the throat on a Cairo street for writing a book that Egyptian terrorists didn’t like. In other words, Egypt cannot abide winning. And thus, naturally, Egypt renewed the contracts of Hossam Hassan and his twin Ibrahim, thereby rewarding the coach responsible for one of the most spectacular chokes in sports history and consequently one of the most repulsive displays of sporting conduct.

People, nations, aren’t supposed to lose like Egypt does, by embracing loserdom as a collective gestalt deployed to blame others for the failures that are only their own. Perhaps the most crucial job of any parent, and coach, is to teach their children how to lose gracefully and what to learn from it so that they may reap victory in the future. Sports is part of that tuition—even the best teams lose sometimes. You can do everything right, execute every play perfectly, but the other side, the other athlete, is simply better. Or you were better, but the calls went against you, or the weather was bad, and that’s just the way it goes.

But if you wanted to breed psychopaths, if you wanted to build a mummy army fed on a strict diet of resentment, you’d tell them nothing is their fault because every outcome is controlled by a mysterious force: colonialism, or Zionism, or voodoo, etc. And then, when things went against them—and things always go against those whose minds and souls are cut to fit the jagged-edged pattern of paranoia—they’d erupt in fits of predictably maniacal rage.

It’s the instrumentalization of those pathological furies that drives the politics of the Middle East. For instance, because of Egypt’s will to lose, Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything, from Mossad dolphins to soccer defeats, to their death in another war with Israel. It’s the same throughout the Muslim Middle East, which is why from Iran to Gaza, the Palestinian cause—the global standard of loserdom—is celebrated like victory.

And now the third-world migrants who have overrun Europe’s shores have brought the same culture to the continent. After Morocco’s loss to France, for instance, North African immigrants surrounded an Amsterdam hotel believed to be hosting Israelis and shouted threats, holding them responsible for the loss. And here, in the United States? It’s not a good sign that the man elected to run America’s greatest city can’t tell winning from losing and gives evidence he thinks like the third-world mobs drenched in resentment, that Egypt was robbed.

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TOPICS: Society; Sports
KEYWORDS: islam; soccer

[MtnClimber]

Egypt and Morocco were both very sore losers.

[sphinx]

The top African team left in the tournament at this stage is France.

Which looks like an NFL or NBA team.

[Rinnwald]

Egypt has a point. However, I thought Iran was screwed too, during the Egypt vs. Iran match.

To this uninformed sap, officiating during the World Cup seemed preferential and atrocious.

[Sirius Lee]

Washington pays Cairo $2 billion a year not to send the millions of young men who blame the Jews for everything

I would have hoped that Trump/Rubio would have put an end to paying the jizya tax to the koranimals.

[ckilmer]

the US choked as well against belgium in the second half.

Norwigian’s best striker fouled out against the Brits. That’s a more subtle form of losing it under pressure.

imho the moroccans were a better team than the egyptians.

[sauropod]

That goes for the whole ME.

[TXBlair]

I delight in the fact that Momsdummi feels that Egypt was robbed!