00:00So if there are reasons that the United States, the host country, believes that could be dangerous for the patrons
00:09and the players, they're going to do what they have to do.
00:13And that's their role as the host country.
00:16America clearly has a right to decide who enters its country or not.
00:22It is not for FIFA to decide that. It is the exclusive right of the American government.
00:27And I cannot, nay, say the information that this anonymous source claims to be the case.
00:35What I can say is it will be greeted with suspicion.
00:38And one of the reasons it will be greeted with suspicion is not simply because this is a referee.
00:43And as I say, the idea that he represents some sort of security threat to America seems to me on
00:48the face of it to be pretty far fetched.
00:50But it will be greeted with suspicion because the president of the United States, the most senior official in America,
00:57has himself made derogatory, racist comments about Somalis within the last six months or so.
01:06And I believe on more than one occasion to describe people from a country as garbage, to describe Somalis as
01:13low IQ.
01:13There is simply no excuse to that. And to the extent that that is playing politics, it is trying to
01:19appeal to the very, very worst of his base.
01:23And it isn't remotely justifiable in that or any other context.
01:28This is really damaging to the reputation of the United States of America.
01:33And this sort of nationalism, this sort of phobia, this sort of prejudice is, I'm afraid, spilling over into my
01:42country in Britain, because often a lot of what happens, I think, in America ends up washing up on our
01:48shores.
01:49And when you are as connected as we are by social media, particularly when a major website X is run
01:57and owned by Elon Musk, who has very extreme politics himself, then what happens in America has an impact here.
02:04And I spend a lot of time as a left-leaning centre-left political commentator in Britain, fighting aback against
02:11the encroachment on our politics of this sort of dangerous rhetoric,
02:16the bringing together of people into groups, the corralling into groups and the discrimination therein,
02:24rather than bringing all of us together against prejudice, against bigotry and against judging people according to the nation they
02:33may have originally come from or their ancestors came from.
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