This won't go down well at all although it's spot on.
It doesn’t make what’s going on at Newcastle any less objectively vile. The bloke’s still a known murderer, and the planet’s foremost funder of extremist Islamic terrorism. He’s still been permitted to purchase a U.K. city’s most important cultural institution, despite the aforementioned “character flaws”.
It’s just to explain why I think thousands of perfectly good and decent people, are performing incredible mental gymnastics to rationalise all of this; and allow themselves to turn a blind eye; and why I think it would be the same had the Saudi finger landed on any other random location on the football map.
I think it was Steven Weinberg who said (to paraphrase), “Good people will do the best they can. Evil people will do the worst they can. But if you want to make good people do evil things, you’ll need religion”. The scenes of the past few days - not to mention the (very grim) replies from Newcastle fans on social media to the fiancé of Jamal Kharshoggi and to Amnesty International - are clear evidence that football is, indeed, a “religion” to many people.
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