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World Cup 2022: Qatar


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3 hours ago, LondonLax said:

If we’re playing a game of ‘top trumps’ surely what Russia had done to the people of Aleppo or what they had done to flight MH17 or what they had done to the people of the Donbas was much worse than anything Qatar has managed in the run up to hosting a sports washing tournament. Yet I don’t remember anything like this level of protests and boycotts during the Russian World Cup or Sochi Olympics. 

Nobody denied that either. Heck, Nick Clegg called for the tournament not to be held there (Cameron naturally did not and we all know why). MPs from other countries did also.

Here's the crap FIFA responded with at the time of the MH17 tragedy and the illegal annexation of Crimea.

Quote

 

“History has shown so far that boycotting sport events or a policy of isolation or confrontation are not the most effective ways to solve problems.”

FIFA said the World Cup could be a “powerful catalyst for constructive dialogue between people and governments”, uniting teams and nations.

 

Talks of boycotts, symbolic or mere gestures, did happen towards Russia when Europe issued sanctions.

I think there are problems of racism in the press in how it frames discussions of the issues in Qatar (and how it looks at the region generally), and I think there's some selective memory that this is some unique event because it's Qatar. Perhaps there's more awareness, more frustrations about attempts before to boycott. The sad reality is, this is nothing new, and FIFA has proven itself morally bankrupt throughout.

Edited by The_Steve
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The ‘oh, but Russia and China’ line is just pure whataboutism, though. And it’s a very weak argument against boycotting and/or criticising the Qatar «world cup».

Even if we all gleefully embraced Russia 18 or Beijing 22 as wonderful, entirely legitimate sporting events (which is far from the case anyway) we should still boycott and/or criticise Qatar 22. Better to get involved now than never, even if you got involved later than you should have. Better to be more aware now than not, even if you should have been more aware before. 

The simple fact is that FIFA, and the IOC, are corrupt organisations that pander to authoritarian, human rights abusing regimes. In Qatar, FIFA are showing just how much they’re willing to pander - ignoring the evidence of corruption, moving it to the winter, ignoring workers’ conditions, toeing the Qatari line on LGBTQ etc. They need to get the message that they’re going to lose us, the fans, if they continue down this path. That’s all we can do. And if enough of us send that message, maybe they’ll listen. Maybe. 

If you’ve only just realised this, that’s fine. I watched the Russia World Cup myself. Join the cause. The more, the better. 

 

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15 hours ago, sne said:

Swedish numbers are down on average 47% compared to 2018 and 36% compared to the Euro's. Obviously Sweden not qualifying plays a part.

We never qualify for anything and World Cup has always had good viewer numbers so it has nothing to do with that.

At least not over here. Sweden may be different.

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10 hours ago, Panto_Villan said:

Yeah, but to be fair I was replying to a post talking about how people are angry because we've gone through Brexit, BoJo and Liz Truss. Unless I've really not been paying attention, you Norweigans probably weren't covered by that comment 😀

To be fair my original post called out several global issues which you haven't listed here. Brexit, BoJo and Truss did also receive international coverage and debate. 

My post was highlighting how a lot has happened in the last few years to make people challenge more and find their voices and it's not just islamophobia causing people to speak up now and not as much in 2018.

I can go back and edit it to include more global issues such as George Floyd/BLM, Australian wildfires, energy crisis, food insecurity, refugee rights, rise of fake news etc if that'll make it clearer. 

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I think more than the values espoused by the Qatari state (which are up to them) it’s the fact that they’re so demonstrably not ready/appropriate to host a World Cup in terms of infrastructure which makes them stand out more than Russia. Not only are they hardly a shining light to the rest of the world in terms of values but,when they were awarded the bid, the infrastructure for hosting didn’t even exist. You’d literally pick 50 or so other countries ahead of them to host. I’ve not even mentioned slave labour element….

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8 hours ago, El Zen said:

The ‘oh, but Russia and China’ line is just pure whataboutism, though. And it’s a very weak argument against boycotting and/or criticising the Qatar «world cup».

Even if we all gleefully embraced Russia 18 or Beijing 22 as wonderful, entirely legitimate sporting events (which is far from the case anyway) we should still boycott and/or criticise Qatar 22. Better to get involved now than never, even if you got involved later than you should have. Better to be more aware now than not, even if you should have been more aware before. 

The simple fact is that FIFA, and the IOC, are corrupt organisations that pander to authoritarian, human rights abusing regimes. In Qatar, FIFA are showing just how much they’re willing to pander - ignoring the evidence of corruption, moving it to the winter, ignoring workers’ conditions, toeing the Qatari line on LGBTQ etc. They need to get the message that they’re going to lose us, the fans, if they continue down this path. That’s all we can do. And if enough of us send that message, maybe they’ll listen. Maybe. 

If you’ve only just realised this, that’s fine. I watched the Russia World Cup myself. Join the cause. The more, the better. 

 

Nobody is claiming people shouldn’t criticise the tournament being held in Qatar. The problem is that the vast majority of the criticism I’ve seen is coverage of Qatar’s human rights record, with very little coverage of the fact that FIFA were clearly bribed into choosing an unsuitable host country (in terms of climate and infrastructure). If the problem is actually FIFA then the negative coverage should be about them.

If you genuinely think that there’s been a fundamental change in the world and any future World Cup held in a country with a patchy human rights record will receive this level of criticism, fine. I don’t agree. Feels to me people feel more comfortable criticising Qatar because it’s some far away country full of brown people with a strange culture, whereas China and Russia are evil in more familiar ways.

And if that’s the reason why the criticism is happening, it’s not whataboutism at all. It’s pointing out racism, which by definition always involves comparing the treatment of two different groups and criticising the double standard.

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16 minutes ago, Panto_Villan said:

Nobody is claiming people shouldn’t criticise the tournament being held in Qatar. The problem is that the vast majority of the criticism I’ve seen is coverage of Qatar’s human rights record, with very little coverage of the fact that FIFA were clearly bribed into choosing an unsuitable host country (in terms of climate and infrastructure). If the problem is actually FIFA then the negative coverage should be about them.

If you genuinely think that there’s been a fundamental change in the world and any future World Cup held in a country with a patchy human rights record will receive this level of criticism, fine. I don’t agree. Feels to me people feel more comfortable criticising Qatar because it’s some far away country full of brown people with a strange culture, whereas China and Russia are evil in more familiar ways.

And if that’s the reason why the criticism is happening, it’s not whataboutism at all. It’s pointing out racism, which by definition always involves comparing the treatment of two different groups and criticising the double standard.

We clearly follow different media sources which kinda makes sense since I'm in Sweden. There has been years of massively critical coverage of FIFA gifting the WC to Qatar (and Russia) with the FA getting critique for not raising their voice against it.

Now that it started thou I think it's only natural for the critique to be aimed at the stuff happening in Qatar with the last minute changes and them going back on things they promised. All abetted by FIFA and Infantino.

Having any critique against Qatar framed as racist is exactly what FIFA will want.

 

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8 minutes ago, sne said:

 

There are also several Serbian fans with Russian banners and flags, with pro war messages etc. all allowed into stadia of course. FIFAs double standard is so ridiculous that being called racist for mentioning it must be the biggest cop out of the year.

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12 hours ago, LondonLax said:

So we’re saying it’s not so much the human rights issues that people have a problem with (because we didn’t have a problem watching Russia), it’s more that Qatar made FIFAs corruption more obvious than their corruption when Russia won it? 

I think, its everything.  Why the need to pin it on one thing?

Probably since Russia people have now woken up a bit as well about allowing sportswashing from Despotic regimes.  There would be a much stronger reaction now if Russia was awarded a big sporting event. 

People now know what they can do if countries like that are allowed a big event without complaint. 

Edited by sidcow
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Also, there’s another issue at play here. If we established that Qatar is an unsuitable host because of their human rights issues, where does that leave us in terms of acceptable hosts?

Africa is out. The few places that might have an acceptable human rights record don’t have the infrastructure and / or couldn’t guarantee security.

Middle East is out for social reasons. The best options would be somewhere like Jordan or Israel but neither would be considered appropriate.

Asia has a couple of democracies like South Korea and Japan that would work. Everywhere else is too small, or has human rights issues (China/India/Pakistan etc). Maybe Indonesia at a push.

South America has a lot of small countries that might struggle to afford it, many of which have security issues. Argentina would work (assuming they’re not being bailed out by the IMF), Brazil could work (depending on deforestation and indigenous rights), or Mexico (depending on security).

And then you’ve got the Western countries full of white peoples. USA, Canada, Australia, plus the EU (but not Poland or Hungary because they’re bad).

I get why moral concerns matter but if you make too much of them you end up with a situation where the Western world decides the only acceptable venues are rich white democracies plus a few select allies, and about 3/4 of the world population isn’t eligible to see their country host this world event.

That’s not to excuse the process of Qatar and Russia being awarded the World Cups, because that appeared to be naked bribery.

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38 minutes ago, magnkarl said:

There are also several Serbian fans with Russian banners and flags, with pro war messages etc. all allowed into stadia of course. FIFAs double standard is so ridiculous that being called racist for mentioning it must be the biggest cop out of the year.

Bloody hell 

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30 minutes ago, sidcow said:

I think, its everything.  Why the need to pin it on one thing?

Probably since Russia people have now woken up a bit as well about allowing sportswashing from Despotic regimes.  There would be a much stronger reaction now if Russia was awarded a big sporting event

People now know what they can do if countries like that are allowed a big event without complaint. 

I think this is absolutely spot on. Society evolves, we learn, we change, we grow. This is a good thing, it’s not double standards, and it’s certainly not racism. 

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