Watch this Cup with Horror

WATCH THIS CUP WITH HORROR
November 16, 2022 | Herald Sun/Sunday Herald Sun/Home Magazine
(Melbourne, Australia). Also in Brisbane’s Courier Mail.
Author/Byline: TZVI FLEISCHER | Page: 20 | Section: OpEd
( WATCH THIS CUP WITH HORROR )

SCANDALOUSLY, this year’s FIFA World Cup will kick off in Qatar on
November 21. I say “scandalously” for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the international soccer federation FIFA’s decision to award the
world cup to Qatar literally became a major scandal.
There have been numerous bribery allegations against FIFA officials, and
police investigations of them, since Qatar was awarded the tournament in
2010.
FIFA president Sepp Blatter was essentially fired over corruption related to
the Qatari and other recent world cup bids.
Blatter has repeatedly conceded the decision to give the world cup to Qatar
was a “mistake”.
He’s right. Unless the sole selection criterion is who is willing to spend the
most money on the world cup, it is hard to think of a country less
appropriate as host of the tournament than Qatar.
Leave aside for a moment the weather issues, which forced this year’s world
cup to be played in November rather than the traditional northern summer,
and the fact that Qatar has virtually no significant achievements in soccer.
As a late October statement by 16 players from the Socceroos highlighted,

awarding the contract to Qatar was a guarantee that the stadiums and other
infrastructure would be built by something very closely akin to slave labour.
Under the notorious kafala system for foreign workers in Qatar, workers
are chained to their employers and often condemned to unsanitary living
quarters and meagre pay.
Despite Qatari claims of reform, reports say thousands of these workers
have been killed or severely injured while constructing the world cup
stadiums with little or no compensation for their families back home,
because Qatari employers routinely categorised their work-related deaths
as heart attacks or suicides.
While none of the Arab Gulf states are democracies, and all have significant
human rights challenges to answer, Qatar is particularly horrendous in
terms of its exploitation of foreign labour. About 95 per cent of the
workforce in Qatar are foreign workers from poor countries with almost no
rights.
Moreover, less discussed is the reality that Doha is the contemporary worst
offender among Arab states in terms of offering support for terrorist and
Islamist extremist groups such as Hamas and the Taliban.
While the princes and officials in Doha can appear smooth and reasonable
to the Westerners with whom they interact, Doha has served as a base for
top leaders of al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, Hamas and other extremist groups,
with the regime’s consent.
Meanwhile, $US360m to $US480m annual contributions from Qatar
subsidised Hamas’s activities in Gaza.
And unlike the smooth words to foreigners, when speaking in Arabic, Doha
routinely spreads messages of support for terrorism and for Islamist
extremist groups, as well as messages of hate against LGBTIQ+ people and
Jews.
Much of this hate comes through Al Jazeera, the well-resourced, slick and
“hip” media outlet funded and owned by the Qatari royal family.
While many know its English language service which is more careful and
professional, the network’s Arabic output is blatantly pro-Islamist and pro-
terrorism.
The network has even been given an award by the terror group Hamas for
its service to the cause of violent “resistance”.

Senior Al Jazeera journalists and presenters have repeatedly made blatantly
anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist statements on and off air.
But the same concerns extend to the official diplomatic representatives of
the regime. Recently, Qatari World Cup ambassador Khalid Salman called
homosexuality a “damage in the mind” in a German TV interview.
This is hardly unique for Qatari officials. Qatar’s new ambassador to the UN
Human Rights Council, Hend Al-Muftah, has an appalling history of
spreading homophobia, anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories on social
media.
She has responded repeatedly to mentions of LGBTIQ+ people with “May
God curse them!” and referred to gay rights as “disgusting rights”.
On the anti-Semitism front, Al-Muftah has also claimed that, via
investments in industry and media, the Jews “ dominated, tyrannised and
ruled the world”, called for the “expulsion” of all Jews from “Palestine”, and
endorsed material accusing the Jews of infecting Western civilisation with
“obscenity and decadence, cocaine, crack, nudity, sex and violence”.
Salman and Al-Muftah are the sort of people the Qatari regime feels should
be representing it internationally. And many Qataris seem to share their
ugly views. When Al-Muftah’s homophobic and anti-Semitic comments
were publicly revealed by an NGO back in September, Qatari newspapers
and journalists rallied to defend her views, writing numerous columns
insisting she was being vilified for telling the truth and called her a role
model and source of pride for her fellow citizens.
Given this spread of open hate by the Qatari regime together with the
dubious means Qatar used to gain the hosting rights, and the indefensible
way the infrastructure for it was constructed, no one should watch the 2022
FIFA World Cup without a sense of deep disquiet – even horror – at where
it is being played.
DR TZVI FLEISCHER IS EDITOR OF THE AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL REVIEW
AT THE AUSTRALIA/ISRAEL AND JEWISH AFFAIRS COUNCIL