Takimag Win or Lose, France’s Soccer-Watching Newcomers Riot It’s obvious most rioters don’t consider themselves truly French. TakiMag Osama bin Laden was supposed to have been a supporter of top English soccer team Arsenal FC. Yet he seems to have since switched his allegiance. Following Arsenal’s defeat by French rivals Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) in May’s Champions League final, Osama himself (or a masked fan dressed as him, anyway) was pictured dancing in the streets of Paris, accompanied by chants of “Bin Laden! Bin Laden!” from his fellow coreligionists. An isolated one-off? Apparently not. In 2012, another supporter was charged with “defending terrorism” after walking into a sports shop requesting that the name of his favorite terrorist be printed on the back of his replica PSG shirt to “honor the memory” of the man. In mitigation, the defendant pleaded he had “seen a lot worse than that—shirts with ‘Adolf Hitler’ on the back for example.”  Were these Hitler-branded PSG shirts all being worn by Muslims too? Following PSG’s victory over bin Laden’s old team, gangs of immigrants filmed themselves celebrating near the Arc de Triomphe, crowing that they had conquered Paris “faster than the German Army in 1940,” and that they now “own the city.” Muslims certainly now own the city’s main soccer team: PSG was bought by Qatar in 2011, with petrodollar billions allowing the squad to be Great Replaced with players mainly of Arab, Sahelian, and black African stock, whether technically born in France or otherwise. Were bin Laden alive today, he really would be cheering for PSG. Misjudgment of Paris During the ongoing FIFA World Cup 2026, the whole world is invited to temporarily enter the United States, Canada, and Mexico in celebration (except certain Somali referees). The whole world has already been invited to enter France for quite some time now, only on a much more permanent basis, and with much more chaos. As soon as Arsenal took an early lead in the Champions League final, riots broke out on the streets. This was explained away as the fans’ natural and understandable despair. Come the end of the game, and PSG triumphing on penalty kicks, by contrast… riots broke out on the streets. This was explained away as the fans’ natural and understandable euphoria during what the French interior minister indulgently called “these festival moments.”  Others preferred to reason that, if riots happened when PSG were losing, and also when they were winning, it seemed more likely the riots truly had very little to do with the game, and everything to do with the rioters mainly being Africans and Arabs who hated their host country. Hard-right French politician Éric Zemmour had this to say the morning after: Yesterday’s violence has nothing to do with soccer. They are the first symptoms of a civilizational guerrilla war. We need a major remigration policy to bring peace back to France. European football has a trite antiracist propaganda campaign, “Kick It Out.” Zemmour would prefer to change this to “Kick Them Out” instead. The French Disease Post-game violence occurred in big, multiculturalism-blessed cities all over France. Around 900 arrests were made, with around 200 police officers injured, together with more than 200 ordinary civilians. Shops were looted, cars torched, and one Paris police station became the subject of an attempted Bastille-style storming. To try (and fail) to keep order, 22,000 officers were deployed nationwide prior to the game; so, whatever they claimed afterward, French authorities knew perfectly well yet more race riots were about to ensue.  Some would paint all this as the justifiable response of oppressed minorities to being harshly prepoliced in this fashion by racist white riot police; they only rampaged because they were provoked into it. The testimony of one targeted fireman suggests otherwise: I saw police colleagues being beaten with iron bars. I saw a police car pelted with stones just as we were coming out to put out a fire that was threatening families. We were attacked by rioters who were shouting at us, calling us dogs. We were just trying to save lives, and we became targets… Shattered shop windows, looted shops, burnt-out cars… all under the pretext of ‘celebrating’ something. I have seen the soccer team I myself support, Liverpool FC, win the Champions League twice in my adult lifetime. On neither occasion did I feel compelled to go out and stab the nearest fireman. I just went down to the official club store and bought a new replica shirt instead. And I didn’t even ask to have the name “bin Laden” printed on the back, either. French Let Us The Champions League final wasn’t even held in Paris, but in Budapest, where, by contrast, there was almost no crowd trouble at all—because Budapest is in Hungary, where mass immigration is unknown. The last time the final was held in Paris, in 2022, however, there was plenty of violence to be encountered in the streets, despite the fact that the game didn’t even involve PSG, but Liverpool and Real Madrid.  This indicates clearly that the problem is not the heightened emotions caused by the sport, but the people who claim to be watching it. French authorities at the time attributed the carnage not to the ethnic minority street criminals perpetrating much of it, but to the innocent visiting Liverpool fans who were its major victims. In the years since, the phrase “It’s Liverpool’s fault” has become a sarcastic French proverb indicating the blatant denial of reality.   Yet EU agencies continue to insist that everything really is “Liverpool’s fault.” Prior to this year’s final, the European Commission launched a propaganda campaign to persuade voters that any impression the continent had been utterly ruined by mass immigration was a fake hypnotic illusion fostered by far-right social media accounts.  EU posts showed a moron in a tinfoil hat viewing a crumbling, post-apocalyptic Paris through faulty, X-broken spectacles, juxtaposed with an accompanying image of the city as Eurocrats claimed it “really” was: pure urban perfection, neat, orderly, friendly, and peaceful. Then, following the final, web users posted actual images of Paris burning, and asked: Who really possesses the faulty spectacles here? Paying the Penalty Following PSG’s victory, elated nonwhite fans could be seen clambering over statues of significant historical French figures like Joan of Arc, which some saw as symbolic acts of public ritual racial humiliation. Such acts now begin at a young age. Last year, Pierre Ménès, a well-known French soccer pundit, described why his 11-year-old son had withdrawn from the world of French amateur soccer: because all the youth teams were now overwhelmingly nonwhite. This withdrawal wasn’t made because Ménès fils was a white racist, though. It was made because all the other kids were nonwhite racists. “They don’t say hello to me, they don’t pass me the ball, they yell at me when I have the ball and they don’t take the shower with me,” the boy complained. For revealing the racism his child had suffered, Ménès was immediately labeled as “racist” by various black footballers.  Meanwhile, in immigrant detention centers, illegal incomers are given free soccer-coaching lessons, and equally free access to live African football coverage, courtesy of the French taxpayer. Sensibly so. If they don’t get such treats, they’ll probably riot. Poor Substitutes It’s obvious most rioters don’t consider themselves truly French. Just look at what happens across France every time the regional Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament takes place: yet more riots, but of a more African-on-African kind. At AFCON 2025, it was calculated that the single largest cohort of players involved were born not in Africa at all, but in France: 107, compared to 29 from Ivory Coast, the second-best-represented nation.  These 107 dual-nationals clearly thought themselves more African than French, and so it was with their supporters back home—by which I mean back “home” in France, not in Cameroon, Algeria, or Mali. Repeatedly, disturbances flared between immigrant-heritage populations, often involving the firing of improvised mortar bombs at one another, reflections of age-old external ethnic conflicts imported pointlessly into the ruined French interior.  France kicked off its World Cup campaign last Tuesday… against their former colony of Senegal. There are more Senegalese in France than any other country in Europe. Indeed, there are more Senegalese in France than there are in most actual Senegalese cities. And yet, despite France winning 3-1 (thanks mainly to goals from nonwhite, non-Frenchmen), the imported continental French-Senegalese did not seem for once to riot, as had been widely predicted. Then you realize why: French authorities had introduced a strict curfew, banning likely rioters from many city streets entirely during games involving African and Muslim nations. Yet, oddly, this same curfew is not in place when teams like, say, England, Canada, USA, Germany, Australia, or Japan are in action. Maybe the true team managers in the Élysée Palace made some bad decisions when deciding whom best to bring into the country through the international transfer market? The post Win or Lose, France’s Soccer-Watching Newcomers Riot appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign policy Blame the War, Not the Peace Deal, for Iran’s Leverage The Islamic Republic may be in a stronger position than ever before. Nobody is making it easy for Vice President J.D. Vance and his team of negotiators.  Israel’s continued military campaign in Lebanon has caused Iran to doubt America’s commitment, or ability, to carry out the very first point of the memorandum of understanding (MOU), which calls for an end to the war in Lebanon and ensures that nation’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty,” and has led to the possible reclosure of the Strait of Hormuz. Trump’s threat, as the negotiators sat down to talk, to the Iranians that if they close the Strait, “you won’t have a country. You won’t even make it back to your f—ing country” violated the clause in point one committing both sides to “refrain from the threat or use of force against each other” and nearly caused Iranian negotiators to walk out just as they were getting started. The only gain the U.S. negotiators have secured so far is that Iran, in Trump’s words, “fully and completely agreed to the highest level Nuclear inspections.” But have they? Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, says Iran has “no plans to invite inspectors from the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency to nuclear sites that were hit by U.S. and Israeli airstrikes in June 2025.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio says that’s not true: “We know what they agreed to. I don’t know why they have to say the things they say.” Iran aims to table nuclear negotiations until near the end of the current talks, but it likely will have to agree to inspections as part of the complete agreement. But that is not a U.S. negotiating win that can be sold to justify the war.  As a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran has historically allowed inspections of its nuclear sites. As part of the 2015 JCPOA nuclear agreement, Iran implemented an Additional Protocol agreement and voluntarily subjected itself to perhaps the toughest inspection regime in history. They suspended the Additional Protocol only in 2021, almost three years after Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and subjected Iran to maximum pressure sanctions. It was only after the bombing of Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities in June last year that Iran suspended cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency. The U.S. isn’t likely to secure an inspection regime better than what the JCPOA brought. But, for Iran, some things may well be better. Agreement has been reached to begin releasing frozen Iranian funds. After the first day of negotiations, the release of $12 billion of frozen funds was agreed to. That promises massive economic relief for the Iranian people. Trump says, “Money that’s being unfrozen is going to be used to buy food, and the food is going to be bought exclusively through the United States.” But remarks by Iranian officials suggest that may not be true. Iran’s central bank governor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, says that, although Iran can purchase American agricultural products “if the price and quality of American inputs are more suitable compared to other countries,” Iran is under “no obligation” to do so under the MOU. Indeed, the document states that the unfrozen funds “shall be made fully usable for payment to any ultimate beneficiary designated by the Central Bank of the Islamic Republic of Iran.” And Iran has, at least temporarily, won another massive source of economic relief from maximum pressure sanctions. This week, the U.S. Treasury Department waived sanctions on Iranian oil exports during the 60-day negotiations kicked off by the MOU, meaning that Iran can export oil at market rates.  One concession that the U.S. is likely to gain is Iran’s agreement to dilute its 60 percent enriched uranium and to suspend its nuclear enrichment program for a specified time.  Diluting its highly enriched uranium, though, is not a huge win or improvement over the JCPOA era. As part of that agreement, Iran shipped about 97 percent of its enriched uranium to Russia and limited future enrichment to 3.67 percent: enough for a civilian nuclear power program but not nearly high enough for a weapons program. After Trump pulled out of the JCPOA and subjected Iran to maximum pressure sanctions, Iran began enriching to 60 percent—still well short of the 90 percent required for a weapon—precisely as leverage to get a deal like this one. As for suspending enrichment, depending on the length of the required period, Iran may well be willing to do that too. It probably needs several years to rebuild the war-damaged infrastructure anyway. The extra years are the trade Iran may be willing to make to win two larger prizes. Barbara Slavin, distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, told The American Conservative that Tehran is willing to temporarily suspend enrichment to win permanent access to their frozen funds, which, ultimately, could bring Iran as much as $124 billion to $167 billion of relief. But, more importantly, a lesson Iran has learned from this war, Slavin says, is that the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz gives them way more leverage than adding another centrifuge or increasing its stockpile of enriched uranium ever did. Along with enrichment, the fate of that crucial sea passage is the tough terrain over which the negotiations will be fought.  Rubio says that the Strait is “an international waterway” and that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway,” but that’s not quite what the MOU says. It says only that Iran must allow safe passage “with no charge, for 60 days only.” That suggests that Iran could see the realization of its demand to charge a fee for transiting as part of a final agreement.  The Strait had always been free and open prior to the war. But the MOU suggests that it could stay under some kind of Iranian management after the war, stipulating that Iran “will conduct dialogue” with Oman to “define the future administration” of the Strait. Returning from the first day of talks, Iran’s chief negotiator, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said, “The Strait of Hormuz will never return to its pre-war conditions and will be administered by the Islamic Republic of Iran.”  On Tuesday, the dialogue conducted between Oman and Iran produced “a joint working group” on the management of the Strait. Contrary to Rubio’s declarations, the two countries emphasized “their sovereignty and sovereign rights over their territorial waters in the strait.” While they committed to keeping the Strait open and safe, they, notably, discussed “the future administration of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, the services to be provided there and the associated costs,” suggesting that, though they would charge no tolls, they could charge service and environmental fees. Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian has also made it plain that Iran’s ballistic missile program will “never” be part of the final agreement: “We will never negotiate with anyone, under any circumstances, ever, about our defensive capabilities.” For Tehran, there is no point in a negotiated settlement that leaves Iran in a position to lose the next round of the war: “If the missiles we have for our defense did not exist, Israel and the United States would have ploughed Iran just like Gaza.” The Trump administration is right to defend the MOU as necessary and good. But it is good because it ends the war instead of allowing it to continue on its increasingly damaging path. They are wrong to defend it as an improvement over the JCPOA or even the deal that was on the table before the U.S. and Israel attacked this February. The Islamic Republic, liberated from maximum pressure sanctions and having demonstrated its ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and withstand major attacks, will be in a stronger position than perhaps ever before. A final agreement should be signed; the war should never have been fought. The post Blame the War, Not the Peace Deal, for Iran’s Leverage appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign policy The U.S. Career Diplomat Scheming With the UN to Block Trump on Migration UN leaders have maneuvered to keep out the Trump administration’s candidate for the UNHCR deputy position to stymie needed reforms. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has appointed Tressa Rae Finerty, a U.S. career diplomat, to be the Deputy UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). While most Americans would regard this an obscure diplomatic appointment, the decision carries significant implications for President Donald Trump’s efforts to thwart global illegal immigration. Guterres intentionally rejected the White House’s nominee and selected someone whom he knows to be clearly out of step with Trump’s objectives for reforming the corrupt international refugee business.  One major issue that requires exposure is the sleight-of-hand ways UNHCR officials have erased the differences between genuine refugees and economic illegal migrants. In 2021–24, UNHCR was a major collaborator with the Biden administration in igniting a global explosion of illegal migrants under the guise of assisting refugees, incentivizing them to “surge” to the border of developed countries, particularly the United States. In a covert funding plan, in part masterminded by Antony Blinken’s State Department, UNHCR expanded cash-assistance programs to encourage economic migrants to pick up, run the risk, and just take off. These were dangerous journeys, often with young children, through places like the Darien Gap on foot or the Mediterranean Sea in a leaky raft. It is difficult to imagine a more irresponsible “refugee” policy.  Using aligned NGOs, UNHCR provided free cash subsidies to illegal migrants, giving out prepaid and debit cards to ensure that millions of clandestine travelers had money to unlawfully move across borders. It is still unknown how much UNHCR financing was made available to the millions of foreigners who moved across Central America and Mexico on their way to the U.S. border.  Since the United States is the single largest donor to UNHCR, contributing around 25 percent of the international organization’s annual budget of roughly $8–10 annual billion, the deputy position traditionally goes to an American. The White House’s nominee was Simon Hankinson, who would have brought gold-standard credentials to the position. Hankinson is not an unprepared Trump political loyalist or a mere policy wonk. During a twenty-year Foreign Service career, he worked immigration and border-security issues firsthand before becoming a leading researcher on migration policy at the Heritage Foundation.  By any measure, Hankinson was highly qualified, but because Guterres and his UN team, rightly, considered him to be a reformer and UNHCR skeptic, they chose another candidate. The last thing that Guterres wanted was a conservative like Hankinson rooting around in UNHCR’s closed financial books and asking hard questions on how the UN bureaucracy mismanages its billions of refugee dollars.  Instead, Guterres offered the job to Finerty, an American diplomat who was serving as the chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Mission to the UN in Geneva. According to media reports, Finerty had asked the State Department to put her name forward for the position but was told that Hankinson was the White House nominee. For a career diplomat, that meant she had orders to use her diplomatic influence to get Hankinson appointed. Finerty instead decided to freelance and promote herself for the position.  Finerty’s skillful but sly maneuvering is also a prime example of an intense debate in the boutique world of American diplomacy over the question whether State Department career diplomats can be counted on to advance the Trump administration’s international agenda. Foreign affairs conservatives have their doubts on this question because the White House’s signature foreign policies—on issues such as migration, trade, climate change, DEI, and foreign assistance—are in direct contradiction with positions that, for decades, the State Department has been advancing on the global stage.  Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his team, unlike their critics, are far from naïve on these matters. From the start, they did not view some senior U.S. diplomats, who made their careers advancing the Obama-Biden international priorities, as the best advocates for Trump’s diplomacy. Thus, there was reasonable justification for Rubio to recall many of them.  Those critics who charge Rubio with bringing Tammany Hall tactics to Foggy Bottom must first address the elephant in the room: Federal Election Commission records document that the overwhelming majority (94 percent) of political contributions from State Department employees during the last election cycle went to the former Vice President Kamala Harris. What does that stunning datapoint say about the ideological balance in the U.S. diplomatic corps?  Still, it should be recognized that most U.S. career diplomats are indeed professionals, who like good attorneys in court can represent a client whose case they personally reject. Yet, again, that does not necessarily mean they are the best advocates for Trump’s diplomacy. Some may be, but others are not, and the lawyer-client analogy only goes so far. After their courtroom exchanges, plenty of attorneys afterward gather privately over drinks to discuss what jerks their clients are. The same thing happens in the professional world of diplomacy. Senior Foreign Service officers have personal networks and reputations that range across many foreign ministries, international NGOs, and multilateral organizations. These personal reputations are enduring and are based typically on the shared liberal-left values that dominate in most diplomatic corps around the world. UNHCR officials knew they could easily find a like-minded career U.S. diplomat to hire who would join them in maintaining the broken status quo on global refugees.  Thus, Finerty knocked on their door. A self-described “multilateralist,” she was never a neutral observer of the current U.S. president and his policies. When Finerty made her personal decision not to support Hankinson, but to promote her own candidacy, she made Rubio’s point on the necessity of the recalls. The honorable course for her would have been to leave her position as U.S. chargé d’affaires in Geneva and resign from the Foreign Service before pursuing her own personal ambition.  Instead of resigning, she remained as Trump’s senior envoy to the UN in Geneva and worked against his candidate. It must have been a bit awkward for Finerty to put aside the orders from Washington, which had instructed her to deliver an official demarche to the UNHCR in support of Hankinson as the American nominee. Perhaps Finerty might feel an obligation to explain publicly to the Foreign Service the explanation for her actions.  Alas, Rubio and his leadership team have learned another hard lesson about leaving senior career diplomats in crucial posts. Those committed to reforming UNHCR can only hope that Mike Waltz, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has taken note of this sneaky affair. Waltz should work with Washington to launch a forceful campaign against the mission-creep, open-border initiatives, and mismanagement inside UNHCR. Such an effort remains crucial to Trump administration foreign policy efforts against illegal immigration.  Beyond the abiding question of whether career diplomats can effectively advance policies they oppose, the central issue remains: Why did UNHCR devote vast financial resources that facilitated the movement of millions of economic migrants toward the borders of developed countries, including the United States? The post The U.S. Career Diplomat Scheming With the UN to Block Trump on Migration appeared first on The American Conservative.

They Fought for This Country. They Shouldn't Have to Leave It to Heal.

Does the Rest of the World Care More About America Than… Americans?