In a parallel universe, activists all over the world are rising up against the jihadi butchers who carried out the atrocities of October 7, who refuse to release the hostages almost two years later, and would like nothing better than the scalps of every kuffar in the West.
But this is the real world, or what passes for it. Thus, as bizarre as it may seem to the few who remain in possession of a functioning moral compass, we have arrived at the point where even bicycle races are being disrupted in the name of Gaza.
Yesterday, the finish to stage 11 of the Vuelta a Espana had to be cancelled because of a gang of flag-waving disruptors in Bilbao, depriving British rider Tom Pidcock of a decent shot at victory over the irritatingly faultless Jonas Vingegaard.
The closer one looks at this case, the more noxious the bigotry becomes
It came after Tuesday’s tenth stage, in which Intermarché-Wanty’s Simone Petilli crashed after the mob attacked the peloton as it was en route to Belagua. For what? It’s not like Benjamin Netanyahu is about to abandon his countrymen for a bike race.
Israel-Premier Tech, the cycling team at the centre of the controversy, has reportedly come under huge pressure from both inside and outside the peloton to withdraw in the face of the protests.
ITV journalist Daniel Friebe reported that ‘several teams’ had demanded that the team pull out, noting that the perennially restive Basque region has a large pro-Palestine movement. That’s what you do if you’re cross about something – anything – these days. You fly the flag of Palestine.
The harassment even extended to the competitors themselves, with Friebe reporting ‘anecdotal reports of Israel-Premier Tech riders being insulted in peloton and on group chats for their assumed political views’.
The closer one looks at this case, the more noxious the bigotry becomes. Israel-Premier Tech has no official connection to the Middle East’s only democracy. It was named by its billionaire owner, Sylvan Adams, who is Israeli and has done much to support grassroots cycling in the country.
Only one of its riders at the Vuelta, Nadav Raisberg, is Israeli, with Britain’s Chris Froome, who suffered a horrendous crash in training last week, the most prominent member of the team. Frankly, however, even if this was the national cycling squad and every single rider was Israeli, this would be a display of prejudice that would never be levelled at any other minority.
Again, one can only marvel at the way in which passions are aroused to such a fever pitch in defence of the forces of jihad, rather than the democracy that suffered at their hands and has spent the last 22 torturous months trying to ensure that this time, never again means never again.
Are these people ignorant to the fact that Hamas has built its depraved strategy around the sacrifice of its own civilians? Do they not understand that there was room for all Gaza’s civilians to find refuge from bombardment in the tunnels, but for the fact that the jihadis didn’t let them in?
Some of them are perhaps that stupid. The majority, however, are so blinded by their ideological frenzy that they stopped listening to reason a long time ago, opting instead to make themselves instruments of Hamas in the fight against themselves.
It’s not just the activists. In the dynamic that is causing Israel’s worst crisis of legitimacy in its short history, leaders who should know better are in turn repressing their own good sense to join hands with the mob. If Keir Starmer caved to pressure from the anti-Semites and vowed to recognise Palestine unless Israel surrendered, what hope for the leaders of the cycling world?
We live in a world in which flying our national flag, which represents one of the freest countries on Earth, is met with repression, while raising the colours of anti-democratic Palestine and ruining a cycling race is seen as very right on.
Sometimes I wonder if we left the real world behind a long time ago and this has been the parallel universe all along.
Never Again? How the West Betrayed the Jews and Itself, by Jake Wallis Simons, is out on October 2 and can be pre-ordered now.
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