Outrage Football

The US military handed out footballs festooned with flags of all nations to Afghan children as goodwill gift and received heartfelt thanks in return. No, actually the kids' elders were (all together now) outraged because one of the flags in question was the Saudi Arabian flag, which has the ward "Allah" written on it.

Did the elders take the footballs away from the kids and put them in a place of veneration and leave it at that? Was the "outrage" aimed at the Saudis for the presumption and poor foresight of putting a supposedly inviolable holy word on a flag, given that flags tend to end up on footballs and other things that get kicked, thumped, bashed, sloshed and shot depending on circumstances? Of course not. It was focused like a gun sight at those wicked Americans for distributing something that they almost certainly did not manufacture themselves and was intended to be used in a way that no one who has a sense of proportion and was not constantly looking for a new grievance would regard as unreasonable. After all, the Union Jack, to give one example, has not one but four Christian crosses on it and no one howls sacrilege when a pair of Reeboks gets scuffed.

This is one of those situations where a strong "get a life" statement is the only one appropriate. For propaganda reasons the Pentagon can't do it, so let's leave it to the more general observations of Pat Condell via Theo Spark.