Hooliganwatch™: Some Strange Bedfellows

Another depressing installment of Hooliganwatch™. The news this week is that some Neo-Nazi groups in Germany are taking the World Cup motto “A Time to Make Friends” to heart. The NPD party, a right-wing extremist group, plans to attach itself to Iran because they admire the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has referred to the Holocaust as “a myth” and has called for Israel to be “wiped of the map.” Ahmadinejad may or may not be attending the tournament to watch Iran play. At the moment it doesn’t look like he is coming. Meanwhile, another right-wing group, the Portuguese Frente Nacional, is intending to demonstrate during the match between Angola and Portugal in Cologne on June 11. Our prediction is that these unfortunate displays of ignorance will be small in scale and won’t overshadow a great global event that does more to bring people to together than it does to divide people.