Joseph Borrell recently rendered Europe as “a garden” and the rest of the world as “a jungle.” This racist delusion became more relevant in the context of the smallest Arab nation to win hosting of football’s greatest competition. The spectacular and most awaited sporting event of the global calendar FIFA World Cup 2022 kicked off in Qatar. The energy-rich Gulf state is estimated to have spent a staggering $220 billion since being chosen as a World Cup host in late 2010, more than 15 times what Russia spent for the 2018 event. A glitzy tournament in a magnificent Middle Eastern desert unleashed pent-up Western chauvinism as the host country came under the radar of Western moral blitzkrieg. No stone was left unturned to portray the tiny Gulf emirate as an Oriental symbol of Arab backwardness. It was first maligned for an alleged corrupt bidding process back in 2010 and since the Garcia Report 2014 failed to present any smoking gun evidence, the barrage of criticism shifted to workers, women and LGBTQ rights in Qatar. Many European teams threatened to wear unauthorized armbands though homosexuality is criminalized in eight of the 32 participating countries. Many eminent celebrities refused to perform in the opening ceremony.
The human cost of the FIFA world cup was spotlighted in a media frenzy without ascertaining the authenticity of the figures. The highly publicized figure of 15,021 migrant worker deaths originates in a 2021 Amnesty International report. Another widely reported figure is 6,500, first published by “The Guardian” in February 2021. Ironically, neither Amnesty International nor The Guardian ever claimed that all these people died in connection with the FIFA World cup. The figure of 15,021 quoted by Amnesty International was obtained from official statistics from Qatari authorities themselves and chronicles the number of foreigners who died in the country between 2010 and 2019.
No stone was left unturned to portray the tiny Gulf emirate as an Oriental symbol of Arab backwardness.
US top diplomat Antony Blinken raised concerns over any curb on freedom of expression during the FIFA world cup. These loquacious claims can’t conceal the murky humanitarian record of the US. The 2020 murder of a black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis unravelled the painful ordeal of Black Americans. The recent bloodbath at Club Q, a gay bar in Colorado Springs, shone a spotlight on burgeoning White nationalist terrorism against Pride movements. US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade opened floodgates of reprehensible abortion laws with most abortions now banned in at least 13 states. The self-styled champion of liberal democracy unleashed fire and fury on foreign lands to protect American soil but a total of 45,222 people died from gun-related injuries in 2020, according to data from US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The lesser said the better about American crimes against humanity in the torture centre on occupied Cuban territory in Guantanamo Bay.
BBC epitomized the “white man’s” racialized hierarchy of the world by not airing the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup though it previously broadcast similar events in Russia and China live. While captions in a British newspaper, The Times, suggested Qataris were not used to seeing women dressed in Western-style clothing. Sardonically, Britain is still basking under colonial nostalgia, as manifested by some high-profile books such as Niall Ferguson’s Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World and Bruce Gilley’s The Last Imperialist. The deadly repercussions of British enlightened despotism were revealed by economic historian Robert C Allen as his findings reveal that rampant poverty gripped the sub-continent under the British crown, from 23pc in 1810 to more than 50pc in mid 20th century, triggering an unprecedented human tragedy. British predatory policies caused tremendous loss of lives, approximately 100 million people during its zenith in India. Historian Mike Davis emphasized that Britain’s exploitative policies were precisely moral equivalents of bombs. So brits castigating Qatar is like the pot calling the kettle black.
A French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine showed Qatari footballers as terrorists holding guns in their hands. French bullying is happening against the backdrop of escalating Islamophobic violence with the surge in anti-Muslim attacks by 38 per cent in 2021. French neo-colonial plunder was recently unravelled by Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni in an interview she gave to Italian TV channel La 7 in 2019. France is using CFA Franc-a currency guaranteed by France and pegged to Euro-to siphon off the monetary sovereignty of its former colonies in Africa.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino rattled western hypocrisy in these words: “I’m European. For what we Europeans have been doing around the world in the last 3,000 years, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people.” West’s bloody crimes of colonialism and its politico-economic havoc upon the Global South continue to haunt the post-colonial world. Europe’s outrageous anti-migration policy and mass trampling of rights left beleaguered non-European migrants at the mercy of freezing cold. Who will hold these morally bankrupt Western nations accountable for thousands of refugee deaths in the Mediterranean Sea? There is another elephant in the room and that’s Western unapologetic support of settler colonial tyrant Israel and its ultra-nationalist apartheid politics, reflecting that these countries are not in a position of moral advocacy.
To understand the Western moral blitzkrieg against Qatar, its pertinent to decipher the intellectual foundations of the contemporary global order. Paul Samuel in the first international relations textbook titled “World Politics at the End of Nineteenth Century” proposed an imperial global order and argued that it is the obligation of powerful races to rule over more barbarous or less well-endowed with the force of mind and character. Propagating racist contours of international relations, British scholar E. H Carr in his work “An Introduction to the Study of International Relations” emphasized that Africans were savages and Indians, Egyptians were immeasurably less advanced than Americans and Europeans. Carr then argued that “it was only expected that Europeans with their truthfulness, integrity and superior character would be leaders of mankind”.
The above-mentioned worrying dynamics were decoded by David Wearing recently in The Guardian as he argues that a racist worldview is driving Qatar World cup activism and “self-serving mythology obscures regional history and legitimises Western interference, it also “externalises and circumscribes the blame for human rights abuses while preserving a narcissistic sense of western innocence.” It’s incredibly difficult to liquidate the astronomical influence of cultural imperialism, yet an Arab nation is projecting the other side of the story, shattering the Oriental trope of depicting all Muslims as terrorists. Those who want to make sports human rights compliant have ignored that Qatar has amended labour laws and improved its relationship with bodies like International Labor Organization, united the conflict-stricken region with fascinating sports diplomacy and reflected the zenith of the Arab world’s soft power.
The writer is a scriptwriter and researcher at Pakistan Television Network, the State broadcaster of Pakistan. She
can be reached at [email protected].