Sportswashing Genocide: The Infantino Doctrine

You cannot force a traumatised child to play football with the children of a nation who are committing war crimes and genocide against them and call it healing. You can only call it abuse.

Gianni Infantino wants a handshake. Not between diplomats, not between generals, but between children, Under-15 footballers from Israel and Palestine, thrust onto a pitch in the United States this coming September, as props in FIFA’s latest PR offensive. Over 350 Palestinian footballers have been killed by Israeli forces. Stadiums either turned to rubble or turned into a modern day concentration camp to detain and torture Palestinians. While the head of Palestinian football was denied a visa to attend the 2026 World Cup in the USA. And Infantino’s response to this slaughter is to demand that Palestinian teenagers, raised in the middle of a genocide, grasp the hands of the children whose parents enforce it, take part in it, revel in it, and committ it. This is not diplomacy. It is an obscenity. It is abuse.

This is not a football tournament. It is ritual humiliation dressed up as diplomacy, a blood-soaked public relations stunt designed to launder the reputation of a genocidal zionist state and the feckless Swiss bureaucrat who props it up. That Infantino’s FIFA is demanding a handshake on a pitch in the United States - a nation that denied a visa to Jibril Rajoub, the head of the Palestinian Football Association, barring him from even attending the World Cup, not to mention continuing to aid and support the Israeli state in their genocide of the Palestinian people - transforms this farce to a sadism so pure it verges on the diabolical.

We are past the point of condemning mere sportswashing. We have entered the realm of necro-politics, where the corpses of murdered athletes are the foundation upon which FIFA builds its “bridges.” To understand the depth of this depravity, we must finally state the historical parallel that polite society, with its carefully calibrated thresholds of acceptable victimhood, refuses to utter. FIFA’s continued embrace of Israel while it conducts a live-streamed annihilation of Palestinian life is the precise moral equivalent of FIFA allowing the Nazi regime to compete in the 1940s while the crematoriums of Auschwitz roared - and just for historical purposes, FIFA allowed Nazi Germany to compete in the 1938 World Cup after invading Austria and were earmarked to host the 1942 World Cup before the Second World War saw the competition cancelled.

If that comparison shocks your sensibilities, your sensibilities are the problem. We have been trained by decades of historical flattening to see the Holocaust in a narrow, sanitised frame - the tragic, singular murder of six million Jews. It was that, but it was infinitely more. It was an act of genocide that consumed up to 17 million innocent souls. The bodies of three million Soviet POWs starved and worked to death are part of that soil. The mass graves holding 1.8 to 3 million non-Jewish Polish civilians, murdered for the crime of being an obstacle to Lebensraum, are part of that soil. The 250,000 disabled people gassed in the T4 program, the tens of thousands of political dissidents, the trade unionists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the homosexuals who wore the pink triangle. Yet Western society has been brainwashed into believing that the Holocaust was solely a crime against European Jews.

We forget their names and numbers at our peril, because the machinery of dehumanisation is always calibrated to expand. The Israeli state has resurrected this machinery. They don’t just kill; they redefine the dead as the killer. They bomb a hospital, pulverise a newborn in an incubator, and before the dust settles, the IDF’s digital hasbara machine spins the lie - it was a Hamas command centre, the baby was a human shield, the paramedic was a militant. It is the bureaucratic logic of the Einsatzgruppen delivered via TikTok. Every child in Gaza is pre-emptively designated a terrorist. Every playground is a military target. Every hospital is a base. This is not war; it is the total erasure of the boundary between civilian and combatant, the foundational principle of genocide.

And yet, Gianni Infantino looks at this bloodbath and sees a marketing opportunity. He wants a photo-op.

According to a report in 2024 by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, the Israeli military had murdered over 350 Palestinian footballers. Let that number sink into the silence of FIFA’s luxurious offices. Three hundred and fifty athletes, youth league hopefuls, national team veterans, coaches of neighbourhood clubs are dead. The BDS movement documents 344 of these names, a grim roster of shattered potential, as of the latest count. These men were not collateral damage; they were targets. Stadiums have been bombed, pitches used as makeshift internment camps and scenes of rape and torture. The Yarmouk Stadium in Gaza, once a monument to athletic ambition, was rused as an interrogation and internment camp where prisoners were stripped, bound, and subjected to torture and rape on the pitch.

In a sane world, this statistic alone would have triggered an emergency congress. Israel would be expelled, not merely suspended, from all global sport, just as South Africa was banished for the infinitely lesser crime of apartheid. Instead, FIFA has placed Israel’s fate in a bureaucratic black hole. Investigations are launched, committees are formed, “independent legal assessments” are commissioned, and the whole thing is dragged out while body bags pile up. Infantino has demonstrated more urgency in protecting the commercial rights to the World Cup logo than in protecting the lives of the players who make the sport what it is.

The obscenity of Infantino’s position is crystallised not just in his inaction, but in his grotesque insistence on a “peace tournament” featuring U15 kids. This is the logic of the abuser, I will break your legs, then hand you a bouquet and demand you smile for the cameras so I can prove to the world what a benevolent person I am.

The Israeli children stepping onto that pitch, no matter their individual innocence, represent a state that has murdered the peers, coaches, and relatives of the Palestinian children standing opposite them. To ask a Palestinian child to “shake hands” with the child of a nation who, in all statistical likelihood, has parents who served in an army that demolished his house or shot his cousin, is not reconciliation. It is a psychological experiment in cruelty. It is forcing the victim to validate the perpetrator’s humanity while the perpetrator’s boot is still on his neck.

And where is this grand ceremony of forced smiles taking place? The United States. A country that has just pulled a move straight out of the authoritarian playbook by denying a visa to the head of the Palestinian FA, Jibril Rajoub, among other individuals they label as terrorist sympathisers or undesirables without any evidence. This isn’t just a diplomatic snub; it’s a logistical decapitation of Palestinian football’s representative at the very moment the world gathers - just as they did with the Iranian national team during their World Cup campaign. The Guardian reported on this blatant act of political warfare, a clear message from Washington that it does not consider Palestinian institutions legitimate or worthy of presence. Yet Infantino, that grinning weather vane, says nothing. He will gladly pocket the American cash, bow to the American political dictates, and still pretend he can offer a neutral pitch for Middle Eastern peace. The United States, which actively provides the very warplanes and bombs turning those 350 footballers into pink mist, cannot be a neutral host. It is a co-combatant. Staging a “reconciliation” match there is like hosting a peace dinner in the munitions factory.

FIFA’s selective morality is not limited to the Levant. The stench of hypocrisy is global. While demanding that Palestinian victims normalise their own slaughter, Infantino has thrown open the gates for Russia’s return to youth football competitions. Even as Russian missiles target Ukraine still, FIFA has determined that Russian U17 teams have been punished enough. The logic is mesmerising. Killing Ukrainians is a temporary suspension-level offense, perhaps worthy of a “dialogue” and a junior tournament re-entry; being a Palestinian victim, however, gets you a mandatory handshake with your killer’s government and the loss of your leaders’ visas. The metric is obvious. Russia is a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the Security Council; Palestine is a stolen nation whose people are being murdered, while the war criminals are being subsidised by the West. Infantino’s FIFA does not deal in justice; it deals in power. He is not a football president; he is a protection racketeer for war criminals.

We are gaslit into believing the founding myth of Israel is a pure response to the Nazi genocide - a genocide that the world wrongly frames solely as a Jewish tragedy, because that narrative has been engineered. This narrow casting, which erases the millions of non-Jewish victims of the holocaust, has been weaponised to create a hierarchy of victimhood. Because the Nazis killed Jews, the argument goes, Jews can never be cast in the role of perpetrators. This is a theological fallacy, not a political argument. The legacy of the Holocaust should be a universal alarm, never again for anyone. The moment you weaponise that history to exempt a state from the norms of human rights, you betray every single one of the victims of the Holocaust.

The Roma, murdered by the hundreds of thousands, have no state to protect them, yet they see their historical suffering appropriated by a state that inflicts a new Nakba. The disabled, the Trade Unionists, the Soviet POWs, their ghosts scream the truth - genocide is the ultimate standardisation of brutality. By drawing a moral equivalence between the IDF’s slaughter and the Nazi genocide, we are not diminishing the memory of the six million; we are expanding the circle of ethical responsibility to include the present-tense victims who share the same fate.

FIFA, under Infantino, has done more than ignore this. He has inverted it. Using the language of “football uniting the world,” he constructs a theatre where the executioner and the victim are cast as equal actors in a conflict. The demand for Israeli Under-15s to play Palestinian Under-15s is a microcosm of the entire sportswashing strategy. It erases the reality of occupation, siege, and genocide. It creates a “false symmetry”, a hallucination where two equal sides must “get along,” ignoring that one side controls the water, the electricity, the borders, the visas, the drone codes, and the right to life.

The Israeli government understands this playbook perfectly. They see the football pitch not as a sporting arena, but as a normalisation laboratory. A grinning child in a bib can undo a thousand images of dead children in shrouds. By standing for a national anthem, or exchanging pennants, the Palestinian team serves as a prop to announce that the occupation is normal, that Israel is just another “side,” and that the genocide is merely a “cycle of violence.” This is why Israel’s government has no problem participating. This is why they openly boast about the “soccer festival” as a propaganda victory. They know Infantino will provide the cover; he always does, from the handshake with Vladimir Putin to the selfie with Mohammed bin Salman.

The only appropriate response from the global football community is rage and boycott. Every national federation that calls itself a friend of Palestine and indeed, every federation that claims to believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights should refuse to take to the pitch against Israel in this context. The Under-15 tournament should be a ghost town. FIFA Congresses should be disrupted. Sponsors like Coca-Cola, Adidas, and Visa, who greenwash Infantino’s regime with their billions, should be named and shamed as financiers of this grotesque circus. What does an Adidas executive see when they watch the footage of that handshake, knowing their logo will be stitched onto a scene of raw coercion and abuse?

To Jibril Rajoub, denied a visa by an American administration that seems terrified of Palestinian testimony, stand firm. Do not send the children. Do not lend your dead to their festival. The 350 murdered footballers demand that their federation refuse to launder the blood off the jersey. If the price of attending a FIFA tournament is shaking the hand that holds the smoking gun, the ticket isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

Gianni Infantino must be named for what he is. He is not a mediator. He is a mortician posing as a matchmaker, applying makeup to a corpse and calling it a date. When historians look back at the great moral failures of 21st-century sport, they will not just see the death of 350 players. They will see the image of the FIFA President forcing oppressed children to smile for a camera, under the banner of a football organisation that long ago lost its soul. Or should that be sold its soul?