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He’s had books, biopics, and entire ceremonies dedicated to him, but our politically correct society has forgotten that Muhammad Ali is a hypocrite who rope-a-doped his country.
Muhammad Ali was a great entertainer and self-promoter. He was the guy you loved to hate for his arrogance, and eventually you loved him because he could back it up. No, he wasn’t the greatest boxer ever – that was Joe Louis. Ali would step into the ring and stay there for 15 rounds, regardless of whether his opponent was better than or far inferior to him. His “knockout” came in the form of making you tired until you finally just shut up and fell to the ground. This rope-a-dope is exactly what Ali did to our country, and we unjustly glorify him for it.
We praise Ali, because his religion required him to be a pacifist and not fight. It would be against his beliefs to join other Americans in Vietnam, he said. Which religion does not require pacifism? Whether it’s the Torah, Koran, or the Bible, all you’ll find in these texts is love and goodness. Guess what, there’s fighting between Jews and Muslims in Palestine and Christians are at war every other minute. All societies realize that while peace is the golden objective, a society can only work if it can keep preserving the values that helped it survive.
Based on Ali’s life, the only thing he found to be worth fighting for was a boxing purse. Whether Vietnam was a good fight is an entirely other argument, but the fact is that a nation’s citizens should be treated equally and experience the good with the bad aspects of government equally. Ali thought he was above this law of nature.
Was Ali, a convenient convert to Islam in the 60's, the single person who knew what the tenets of the religion are? No, he is a hypocrite who profited from beating men senseless for his own gain, and then suddenly decided that his fellow countrymen did not deserve his services for the nation’s benefit. (At worst, Ali would have been asked to be in the Coast Guard or to visit troops in Vietnam anyway).
Ali questioned the motives of Vietnam, commenting that no Vietnamese person had ever done anything to him. Would a response of “no Nazi has ever done anything to me” be accepted in 1941? Ali was a selfish coward. He kept battling society until it gave up and revised his resistance into a plight in the history books. The boxer lived in a country that gave him the opportunity to speak his mind and get rich. Our nation was fighting battles against a Communist force that was the antithesis of the capitalist way of life Ali enjoyed. He didn’t see fit to protect the interests of that way of life. Maybe Vietnam was wrong, but he had no right to diminish the memories of those who fought by declaring his objection to violence that he likely found senseless because it didn’t entail as large of a paycheck as boxing.
He could have gone to Canada, but who was going to pay him there?
Butch Rogaine spent 10 years in a Guam POW prison. He has written numerous articles and books, including I Hate Ali; Watch Out Children, When Your Bed Shakes It Means Ali is Under There; and Ali Floats Like Scum to the Top and Smells Like a Sheep. |
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