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2010 World Cup: RW Johnson Is Banned From Attending It

Your Correspondent confesses to fantasising, every now and then, about having express delivery of the world’s great newspapers – one of them being the UK’s Sunday Times, which is stuffed so full of ephemera that you can explore its pages right up until the next edition. (SA’s own Sunday Times, meanwhile, is good for about 2 hours of diversion, provided you fix snacks and coffee at least once.)

But now, having seen a piece by RW Johnson in the UK Times’ online edition – which pooh-poohs SA’s readiness to host the 2010 World Cup – I’m lining the office catbox with the paper in effigy. (Using our own Times as a poor substitute.)

If there were a Hague tribunal for one-sided reactionary smut peddling disguised as journalism, Johnson would be facing it right now. Lines that were fished out of Nick Griffin’s garbage like this one –

    Fifa draws its confidence from the fact that South Africa successfully hosted the 1995 rugby World Cup — but that was a far smaller event and the country could then rely on the infrastructure that white South Africa had bequeathed.

– clearly place the writer in the same moral territory occupied by assassins. The man’s a jackal, and if there’s any justice, Johnson will see the “infrastructure” of his fabled “white South Africa” momentarily resurrected, that he might be “bequeathed” one of its banning orders, renewable indefinitely through August 2010.