Pro-Kremlin disinformation targets the Paris Olympics with baseless homophobic and anti-Semitic rhetoric to discredit the Games, accuse the West of moral decrepitude and portray Russia as a victim of Russophobia.
By EUvsDisinfo | August 10, 2024 —
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The Olympics are a time of inspiration and joy for most people around the world. At the Kremlin, however, disinformation spreaders are grumpy. Their athletes could not bear the Russian flag because of Russia’s continuing aggression against Ukraine. So the Kremlin slanders the Paris games and everything about them.
Pro-Kremlin commentators have been attacking the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, claiming without evidence that she is a man. The controversy goes back to last year, when Khelif was victorious over a previously undefeated Russian boxer in New Delhi. A few days later, the Russian-dominated International Boxing Association, or IBA, claimed that a test had revealed that Khelif has XY chromosomes. But they never released any specific details about the test.
In 2023, the International Olympic Committtee (IOC) withdrew its recognition of the IBA owing to longstanding allegations of corruption. Recently, IBA president Umar Kremlev, a Russian sports official, referred to the president of the IOC, Thomas Bach, as ‘a chief sodomite’. Then, in a shambolic press conference on 5 August, Kremlev pushed pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives about the Games’ opening ceremonies.
The Kremlin has also tried other ways to discredit the Paris games with disinformation narratives. The common denominator was to engage in unashamed mud-slinging. Pro-Kremlin TV host Vladimir Solovyov, for example, attacked the opening ceremony with homophobic slurs, calling the French leadership the ‘faggot movement’.
Below, we lay out three other major disinformation narratives about the Games that are cynical, exploitative, ugly, awful, and shameless. Some things don’t change, even for the Olympics.
When the bully whines
The first big narrative consisted of pro-Russian commentators whining that Russia’s absence at the Paris Olympics couldn’t have anything to do with the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Instead, Russian athletes could not compete under the Russian flag because the EU and specific European countries are Nazi and Russophobic. Once more, the bullying Kremlin portrayed itself as the victim.
Examples were numerous. One article claimed that Europeans cannot be de-Nazified, have a ‘passionate love of a good life at the expense of others’, consider Russians to be ‘Untermenschen’, and are anti-Semitic. Another called the Games a ‘summit of Russophobia’ and the IOC ‘the EU’s sport branch’. Yet a third bizarrely accused the Baltic States, Poland, and the UK of ‘racial discrimination’ against Russian athletes.
The Kremlin’s standard inversion of culpability was often on display – Russia is the victim and bears no responsibility for its actions. Instead, the EU and the IOC are responsible for daring to object to Russian actions. One commentator approvingly quoted Valentina Rodioenko, the head coach of the Russian gymnastics team, saying that Russia’s absence was a ‘disgrace’ for the IOC. The idea makes as much sense as a 12-year-old calling a waiter who refuses to serve him a bottle of vodka a disgrace.
The same article alleged that the Olympics wouldn’t be interesting without Russia. And yet, the Games have gotten along just fine without Russia. In the US, viewership of the opening ceremony was up 79 per cent from the 2021 ceremony in Tokyo. In France, viewership has been breaking records. Overall, in Europe, estimated 100 million people have watched the games through the Discovery+ platform alone, blowing away expectations.
Satan goes for the gold
The second narrative departs from mere complaining to engage in much more outlandish claims. In essence, pro-Kremlin commentators and outlets assert that Satan himself is competing in the Paris games, winning all the gold medals, and the usual culprits are giving him the highest scores. In this instance, pro-Kremlin homophobia and blatant anti-Semitism run laps around all the empty talk of Russophobia.
This ‘Satanism’ narrative focussed on the unconventional scene in the opening ceremony: a portrayal of Dionysus, the Greek god of festivities and wine, arriving at a pagan festival. The Olympics did, after all, originate with the ancient Greeks. Some perceived the scene, however, as mocking Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, ‘The Last Supper’, and Christianity more broadly. However, the French organisers have insisted they intended no mockery.
Pro-Kremlin commentators used the buzz around the opening ceremony to advance their familiar disinformation narrative that the West is trying to subvert all that is good and wholesome in traditional societies. For example, one piece proclaimed that Olympic organisers had ‘made lesbians, transpersons, and prostitutes the heroes of the last supper’. Another commentator breathlessly alleged that the ceremony was a sermon on ‘sexual depravity’. He also claimed that ‘perverts’ – his term for gays – ‘bring global wars’.
But this Last Supper obsession was just the diving board into a larger sea of silliness. Let’s pretend the pro-Kremlin articles are Games participants, and award disinformation medals corresponding to their levels of Herculean hysteria.
The Kremlin’s disinformation pedestal
One Kremlin personage, referring to ceremony’s artistic director and a prominent LGBTIQ+ activist, put it thusly: ‘Gay Jew Thomas Jolly cast lesbian Jew Barbara Butch to play Jesus’. We would give that person a medal for the most obnoxiously false, anti-Semitic, and homophobic comment.
Hold on – another contender has appeared on the track and is gaining ground fast. This person described the opening ceremony as ‘a witches’ sabbath’, ‘devilry’, and a ‘mockery of Christianity’ that ‘outraged the overwhelming majority of humanity’. This deserves the second place medal for staying loyal to the Kremlin’s feigned concern with protecting ‘traditional values’.
A few more entries tried their best to compete for the third place. One piece declared that the West is the Devil and must be destroyed. Boring, seen it. Another pontificated that medals at these Olympics should look like an inverted Satanic cross. A mediocre effort, not quite enough for the bronze. Yet a third piece claimed to detect freemasonry and paedophilia at the ceremony.
We have a late entry. A commentator on Sputnik Belarus writes: ‘The organisers of the Olympic games in Paris announced the Apocalypse in the person of Death, the rider on a pale horse, the end of the biblical project, transition to hell in the form of transhumanism, and the transformation of peoples into an Antichrist-led horde.’ This level of pro-Kremlin disinformation mental gymnastics deserves at least an honourable mention, if not a prime spot on the Kremlin’s disinformation pedestal.
Our Olympics were better than yours
A smattering of commentary strained to allege that Russia has no need to go to the Paris Olympics anyway because athletic events held in Russia have always been better. These stories were especially prominent in Arabic, although one English-language commentator gratuitously insulted the Frenchness of the games.
One article cited sabotage attacks on the French railways services in comparing the Paris Olympics unfavourably to the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the 2018 Moscow World Cup. Unsurprisingly, Russian Security Council Vice Chairman Dmitry Medvedev called the Paris games ‘pathetic’ compared to previous sports events held in Russia.
Pro-Kremlin outlets searched high and low for negative comments about the games from participants and media figures. Outlets highlighted an Egyptian player alleging that athletic teams suffering from a lack of food and water. An Italian broadcaster was cited complaining about the bad coffee that, he surmised, was made with dirty water from the Seine.
In conclusion, Russian disinformation couldn’t leave suffering and humiliated female athletes alone. On 5 August, articles appeared bemoaning that some Western outlets had correctly noted that the IBA is Russian-dominated and, by the way, homophobic.
Of course, commentators doubled down, flaunting their homophobia while falsely claiming that men at the Paris Olympics are allowed to hit women in public. ‘The LGBT movement is forbidden on Russian territory,’ the article stated in reference to the controversy around Khelif that the IBA invented. The statement was odd given that such commentators have falsely accused Khelif of being transexual, not gay, but never mind. The article continued: ‘[S]uch a word as LGBT should be banned, as it is pure perversion and should be named accordingly.’ Only a sore loser would write such things.
See Also: « Les compères du Kremlin diabolisent les Jeux olympiques de Paris » — EUvsDiSiNFO — (2024-08-10) —
