Preparing to compete in next month’s 2022 World Cup, Australia’s national men’s soccer team has condemned host nation Qatar’s human rights record.
In a video, 16 Australian players lamented Qatar’s repression of LGBT rights. The Aussies added that hosting “the World Cup in Qatar has resulted in the suffering and harm of countless of our fellow workers.” This rhetoric deserves praise. It reflects Qatar’s criminalization of homosexual relationships and its use of effective slave labor to construct many of the stadiums in which the tournament will be played.
Of course, Qatar’s expensive public relations effort has an answer for everything. Responding to Sky News’s request for comment, Qatar’s tournament authority offered a fantastic response. “New laws and reforms often take time to bed in,” it said, “and robust implementation of labor laws is a global challenge, including in Australia … No country is perfect, and every country — hosts of major events or not — has its challenges.”
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True, no country is perfect. True, every country has its challenges. Also true? Very few countries use slave labor. Qatar’s attempt to compare its human rights record with that of Australia would be hilarious were the stakes not so serious.
After all, Qatar’s labor law reforms do not involve things like improved employment tribunals. No, they involve a rather overdue end to employers forcing impoverished foreign laborers to hand over their passports, forcing those workers to engage in manual labor in soaring temperatures without enough water, and forcing those workers into overcrowded residences which are unfit for habitation. This is not hyperbole. Thousands of migrant workers have died in Qatar since FIFA awarded that nation the World Cup. Their families have been left with little to no compensation.
Put simply, there can be no comparison between what workers or, indeed, homosexuals face in Qatar and what they face in Australia or the vast majority of other nations around the world. Which begs our return to a familiar question: how on Earth did Qatar, a nation hardly known for its footballing excellence, get the World Cup in the first place?
Well, it threw big bucks at lobbying and espionage efforts to secure its tournament bid. Oh, and it used quite a bit of corrupt bribery. Unfortunately, befitting FIFA’s rampant corruption and leaders like its former president Sepp Blatter, the world soccer governing body cares little over this polluting of what should be the greatest tournament of the world’s greatest game. Instead, FIFA pretends that Qatar’s piecemeal reforms justify its retention of the tournament.
But this equivocation ignores the fact that Qatar puts money first. Had FIFA demanded real change at the risk of Qatar losing the tournament, real change would have followed. Remember, Qatar’s commitment to Islamic morality is delineated only by the dollars on the table. We have proof of this. Pursuing trade relations with Beijing, both Qatar and its UAE nemesis actively excuse China’s genocide against its Uyghur Muslim population. The moral hypocrisy is stunning: homosexuals represent a mortal threat, genocide against the Islamic Ummah (community)? No problem, baby.
Still, this rotten leveraging of bucks for influence reaches way beyond FIFA. Take Britain: Desperate to retain lucrative defense exports, the British government has even established a joint Royal Air Force-Qatari Air Force squadron. A senior RAF officer met with Qatari counterparts on Thursday and the RAF will provide combat air patrols to help protect the tournament. Qatar appreciates the deference. Its state-aligned media praised Britain’s foreign minister James Cleverly for telling U.K. fans traveling to Qatar to show “a little bit of flex and compromise” over the nation’s laws on LGBT issues.
This is a sorry state of affairs. Hopefully, more teams will find Australia’s courage to speak up. Until then, we can only lament that we failed to take heed of Ian Holloway’s 2010 prophecy, as below.
