Political Pep-Talk:
A Left-Wing Soccer Manager’s Support For Catalan Independence & Mass Islamic Immigration Are Logically Incompatible

Pep Guardiola, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

1,904 words

As I discussed in a previous article, Sir Jim Ratcliffe, the co-owner of Manchester United Football Club, caused controversy last week by saying that, thanks to uncontrolled mass immigration, his home-country of the UK was being “colonized by immigrants.” Across the city at United’s local rivals, however, the prospect of Europe being conquered by outsiders seems to be an altogether more welcome one to other leading lights in Manchester’s football (as in “soccer” for US readers) hierarchy. This July, the leading Catalan football coach Pep Guardiola will have been the manager of English Premier League club Manchester City for an entire decade. To judge by recent events, he may by now be becoming a little bored in this role, longing for a new career kicking political footballs around instead.

In a February press conference, Guardiola touched upon a controversial refereeing decision made during a 2-2 draw with Tottenham Hotspur, which he considered incorrect, declaring the evidence was there on camera for all to see—before then bizarrely widening this opinion out to imply that this was precisely the same as how there was explicit evidence of what he called an ongoing “genocide” in Gaza caught clearly on camera too, but still the world’s referees refused to blow their whistles and intervene. That must have been some foul the ref had missed against Spurs, for the manager to begin comparing it to a war-crime.

He Talks a Good Game

“In the history of humanity we have never ever had the info in front of our eyes, watching, more clearly than now,” Guardiola explained to reporters, but he didn’t just mean relating to dodgy handball decisions. “Genocide in Palestine, what happened in Ukraine, what happened in Russia, what happened all around the world, in Sudan and everywhere, what happened in front of us,” Pep continued. “If you don’t want to see it, it’s our problem as human beings.” Yes, where on earth is the geopolitical VAR (Video Assistant Referee) review?

Football now being wholly beneath him, Guardiola continued to argue that Europe should drop its border-controls entirely and allow all the illegal immigrant boat-people to invade the continent’s beaches in the name of love, like in The Camp of the Saints:

The people who have to do that, run away from their countries, go in the sea and then go on a boat to get rescued. Don’t ask if he is right or wrong, rescue him. It is about a human being. After we can agree [or] criticize but [if] people [are] dying, you have to help. Protecting the human being and human life is the only thing we have, not just in these parts of the world but every part of the world.

For holding forth in such impeccably Left-wing fashion, the media largely treated Guardiola with an exaggerated respect which his platitudinous statements did not deserve. The only true dissenting voices came from Manchester’s Jewish inhabitants, who told him to “focus on football,” a topic he actually knows something about.

As was pointed out, when an Islamic terrorist stabbed Mancunian Jews to death in the name of Palestine at a synagogue only a few miles away from Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium last October, Guardiola reportedly expressed no public sympathy whatsoever—perhaps because, the club being foreign-owned, his ultimate Manchester City petrodollar paymasters are Palestine-friendly Muslims from the United Arab Emirates?

What Guardiola perhaps does not realize, however, is that, once the Jews have been successfully dealt with, the next people with their names inked in on the Big Islamic Kill-List are everyone else in the West too—including proud, open-borders activists like himself, who stupidly agitated to let them all sail here the first place.

Shouting From the Touchlines

Guardiola has long displayed an ostentatious public sympathy with both Palestine and Muslim “refugees” in Europe. Several times, he has eschewed a football manager’s usual garb of suit and tie, or club-branded tracksuit, to stalk the Premier League touchline in a cheap gray hoodie emblazoned with the bright red slogan “OPEN ARMS.”

This was less a fashion-statement and more of a political statement, even though such things are supposed to be banned at Premier League games. “Open Arms” is the name of a pro-refugee charity run by Òscar Camps, a Spanish “entrepreneur, lifeguard and activist”, which seeks to “protect the lives of the vulnerable at sea, first in the Aegean, and later on in the central Mediterranean.” Which means serving as a free marine taxi-service for illegal Islamic immigrants.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Against Imperialism here.

Why was Guardiola helping such a “charity” not only with donations, but also with free publicity? “He believed our values matched his,” said Camps, so much so that Guardiola invited the group’s operatives to the Manchester City training ground to lecture his players on the benefits of a borderless world—as rootless multi-millionaires, you may expect they were already aware of said benefits, at least for the likes of themselves. If Guardiola had possessed staunch anti-immigration values, and worn a hoodie emblazoned with “CLOSED DOORS” in support of pro-borders vigilante activists from the Visegrad Group of nations, would the Premier League still have allowed him to don it during games?

What he turns up wearing to work next could be even worse. In early February, Guardiola was given permission by his kind Emirati employers to miss team training-sessions and other normal duties of a football coach to address a pro-Palestine crowd at a rally in his home-city of Barcelona—something which is very definitely not a normal duty of a football coach. Here, clad in the obligatory monochrome keffiyeh, the 55-year-old dhimmi wished his crowd Salam alaikum, which is Arabic for “I’m a Useful Idiot” before observing of the Israeli military’s campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip that “What bombs cause. . . is silence” a statement which suggests Mr Guardiola is perhaps not all that familiar with the common auditory properties of bombs at all.

He himself refused to remain silent, though, telling the crowd that “I am not neutral, I am Palestinian.” What did Guardiola mean by this? How is he “Palestinian”? Just because he likes wearing a tea-towel on a stage, accepting large sums of tainted money from Arab regimes, and undermining internationally recognized borders? The true, and somewhat surprising, answer may in fact be “Because he is Catalan.”

Damage to Catalonia

The club Guardiola represented with distinction throughout most of his playing career, and later went on to manage with even greater success, was Barcelona FC, with whom he won the team’s first ever European Cup in 1992, Barcelona being the de facto capital city of the wannabe separatist Spanish region of Catalonia. When he brought the trophy home in triumph, such were Barcelona’s non-adulterated post-Franco demographics, he was still able to address a cheering crowd not with the words Salam alaikum, but with a locally famous quote from a noted Catalan independence leader, rejigged to sound as if it was about football, not separatism. At this point, he still wore a Catalan flag around his neck, not a keffiyeh. Soon, this latter form of fashionable scarf may well be repurposed to act as a noose, although he appears not to realize this fact yet.

Pep and his family are long-term members of the Catalan cultural nationalist group Òmnium Cultural, and his older sister has worked for the Catalan government, once being its ambassador to Scandinavia. Being such a famous media figure, Guardiola has become one of the main public faces of the campaign for Catalonia to be given a referendum on the chance to break away from Spain politically and become its own micro-nation.

The real Spanish government in Madrid consistently refuses to allow Catalonia to hold any such vote, though. When, in 2017, the region’s leaders went ahead and held an illegal referendum on the issue anyway, and were imprisoned or exiled for their efforts, Guardiola showed his support by repeatedly wearing a yellow ribbon, the chosen modern symbol of Catalan resistance, to Premier League games, incurring a £20,000 fine from the Football Association. In supposed contrition, he then began sporting the equally yellow daffodil symbol of the Marie Curie organization instead, crudely exploiting the logo of a cancer charity to get his same point across in barely-concealed disguise.

Other Spaniards have criticized his stance on Catalan independence, skeptical politicians alleging he only played for the Spanish national team for money, and former team-mates saying “I do not know when his brain mutated” but of course Pep has a perfect right to wish for regional independence, and has had the good grace to acknowledge that, for example, the broadly comparable 2016 Brexit vote for freedom from rule by Brussels was wholly legitimate. The real problem comes in his wholly incompatible simultaneous agitation for the causes of Islam and mass immigration into the province.

Surreal Madrid

The Barcelona region has long been a hot-bed of support for Palestine, nationalism there being traditionally Left-wing and radical in nature, not Right-wing and conservative as you may logically expect nationalism to be. Viewing themselves as politically and ethnically oppressed from afar by the Right-wing Catholic forces of General Franco in Madrid, the Leftist Catalan independence movement historically saw the Palestinians, likewise oppressed by the Right-wing Jewish forces of Tel Aviv, as their geopolitical twins. Hence, to support Gaza became to support Barcelona by proxy.

But there is more to the Catalan independence movement’s Islamoleftism than this, as I have shown on Counter-Currents at length previously, in what was my very first article for the site. The largest source of immigration into today’s Spain is from South America, whose people tend to speak Spanish, and so can become relatively well-integrated. Catalan separatist parties, however, have obstinately preferred to encourage non-assimilable immigrants, largely Muslim, from Pakistan, Africa, and Arabia, into Catalonia, viewing them as more malleable and willing to one day vote for the region to break away from Madrid, which may well be true—but only so they can then later vote to submit to the infinitely harsher yoke of Mecca once there are enough of them.

Today, thanks to the open borders efforts of short-termist separatist dupes like Guardiola, Catalonia has the largest Muslim population in Spain, and the most Islamic terrorists: one of the al-Qaeda operatives who flew a plane into the Twin Towers on September 11, Mohamed Atta, was based in the area in the run-up to the attack. Foreign criminals and rapists fill the region’s prisons, whilst radical imams brag of one day returning Catalonia to the realm of the medieval Islamic empire of Al-Andalus, one preaching in his mosque that:

We have to take advantage of the separatists because they rely on us to get votes, but what they do not know is that, once they allow us to vote, we will all vote for Islamic parties because we do not think about left and right. This will make us win mayoralties and … Islam will begin to be implemented.

As a proud Barcelonista, Pep Guardiola will be well aware of the region’s Catalan National Day, which he doubtless celebrates back home each and every year. . . on its regular annual date of September 11. When he struts around the city and sees all those Salafists he has blindly helped import rejoicing on this very same yearly date likewise, does he really think Catalan independence is the holy cause they are likely to be cheering?