I previously wrote an article about FIFA for the State of Affairs (SofA), I briefly explained the historical success of the Moroccan National Team and the sociological foundations of their inspiring struggle against their former rulers in this article. This time, you will read a completely different article about the FIFA World Cup. Let's take a look at the one-sidedness of both sides in the discussions about Qatar 2022.
First, the elephant in the room: FIFA, the global governing body of the most beloved sport on the planet, has been the breeding ground of corruption and bribery for decades. Or to say the very least, it has been since the tenure of former FIFA President Joao Havelange.
The scandals during the Brazilian’s tenure on FIFA's Executive Committee were brought to the attention of mainstream media by the Netflix special, "FIFA Uncovered." As you might have heard in the news or just simply read on Wikipedia, the Brazilian and his son-in-law Ricardo Teixeira took more than 41 million Swiss francs ($43.9 million) in bribes in connection with the award of World Cup marketing rights, according to a Swiss prosecutor's report released in July 2012.
I am not scapegoating Havelange for all the corruption at FIFA but when you look at the entity’s history, it is kind of clear that he was one of the pioneers if not the leader of wrongdoings there.
After Havelange, corruption was more or less institutionalized at FIFA.
Maybe that’s why an organization that is expected to be a driving force for good, for human rights, the fight against racism and democratic values gave organizing rights of the last two World Cups to countries where such progressive values are not as championed as the more democratic Western countries.
Nevertheless, we should ask ourselves a very simple question: if we want the least democratic countries with horrible records in human rights to progress, is imposing democratic values on them going to work, or should we just take things easy and let them find their own paths to democratization instead? "A deus ex machina" kind of resolution to undemocratic practices employed by authoritarian countries seems to never work, and football might actually be a good medium for some soft diplomacy through which such countries might be nudged into the right direction by making their integration into the progressive world more smoothly.
That’s why giving Qatar an opportunity to host the World Cup was not the worst idea after all. The very act of trying to cover up all the laborer deaths and horrible human rights conditions in the country through the use of the blanket accusations of “Islamophobia” or “racism” has obviously sinister motives and is disturbingly close to Norman Finkelstein’s takes in his chef-d'oeuvre, the Holocaust Industry.
The only difference is, the crime against humanity that is being industrialized now is not the Holocaust, but rather Islamophobia with undertones of racism against Arabs or Qataris.
Throughout the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022, there have been two opposing sides in the debate: the ones that lamented FIFA for giving Qatar the rights to organize the tournament due to some very obvious problems with regard to allegations of rigged voting, laborer deaths and human rights conditions in the country; and the ones accusing the anti-Qatar bandwagon of hypocrisy and having ulterior motives steeped in Islamophobia and anti-Arab bigotry.
Let me tell you something, both sides in this debate are both right and wrong. Told you it was complicated, but please continue reading.
People in this camp opposed Qatar’s hosting of the tournament altogether since Qatar was even just a candidate. They said that it would be just an opportunity for Qatar to “sports wash” its human rights abuses, the de facto caste system between the overwhelmingly outnumbered Qatari citizens who enjoy luxurious and rich lives and the laborers who come from all over the world to the tiny peninsula to work hard to make the Qataris’ lives even more luxurious and lush, and the grim fact that over 6,500 laborers have died since the country was named as the FIFA host in 2010.
They have some solid and valid points in their opposition to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup, but like anything else in the observable universe, things are not so transparent in this debate either.
Yes, the voting for the 2022 World Cup host at FIFA headquarters may have been rigged and even former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was complicit in covertly telling former FIFA executive committee member and French football great Michel Platini to vote for Qatar in a closed-door meeting; yes, Qatar is not the most democratic country out there and yes there have been tragedies involved in its handling of the organization with regards to laborers.
Those are utterly unacceptable and yes should have prevented Qatar from ever hosting such a tournament. Nevertheless, the reality is they did and when you look back at what happened from the most pollyannaist viewpoint: This was the first World Cup to ever take place in the Middle East and the Arab world. Care to count how many great democracies where human rights are absolutely cherished are to be found in the region? Should the democratized world with the best human rights practices just abandon the region and cease all hopes for its democratic future, or just start integrating it somehow? That was a very grim sacrifice that had to be made for the sake of reconciliation and dialogue with the region, and even though the laborer deaths and other problems can never be justified, what happened happened and there is no going back. Realism is going to save humans as a species, and not romantic approaches that are opposite to reality.
Long story short, people in the “sportswashing” camp had some really valid points with regard to the importance of human rights and laborer working conditions, and the never-acceptable worker deaths. Nevertheless, we had to start somewhere. Hell, even North Korea, probably the worst dictatorship in the entire Milky Way, is a member of the United Nations; and there is a reason for not kicking it out of the bloc. We absolutely have to keep some dialogue in place.
Since the tournament began, we have read all about how racist and Islamophobic Westerners were. The take basically goes: “The opposition to Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup is not criticism for the sake of human rights but is an opportunity to insult Arab and Muslim cultures.”
We best observed that this take had some truth in it when Argentina was crowned champions and the legendary Lionel Messi wore a “bisht,” a traditional Arab overgarment that symbolizes dignity and nobility. “A sleazy cloak” and “a stupid coat” were just kinder examples of slurs used on social media that night.
Another example of this is the ugly remark made by a host about Morocco's national football team players and their families in a program broadcast on a Danish TV channel. TV 2 NEWS presenter, Christian Hogh Andersen, tried to move from a story that featured footage of Moroccan players hugging their mothers and celebrating after winning a World Cup match in Qatar to the next news segment about animals and how they assemble to keep warm, by holding up a picture of monkeys.
The racism directed at the Arab culture and Islamophobia were so prominent and undeniable and proved the point of people bashing the Westerners over racism and hypocrisy.
There is no denying that Islamophobia is rampant across Western countries and Arabs are, to put it kindly, not the most popular minority living there. Moreover, there is absolutely nothing wrong with seeing and calling out the glaringly obvious racist and Islamophobic motives, and the fight against those two types of bigotries is utterly important. Nevertheless, just completely ignoring everything that is wrong with Qatar under the pretext of opposing hypocrisy, racism and Islamophobia is, to put it simply, erroneous.
I know that taking sides and fighting for a cause is one of the most fundamental aspects of human psychology. But as humans evolve mentally, so should their mindsets and the ways they perceive the world.
On the other side of the coin, I think we can confidently say that undemocratic countries cannot be blamed for their undemocratic practices altogether; history, fears of occupation, imperialism, and ideological obsessions all took part in what they are today; and that’s not to say dictators or dictatorial governments had no role – in fact, most of the blame lies upon them. But just take a gander back for a moment; the highly democratic West was where women had no voting rights a mere 100 years ago. So, things take time.
Progressive values of the West are yet to be adopted by the less democratic countries and embraced by the citizens living there.
If we want a global reconciliation, we should keep an open mind and take advantage of soft diplomacy through sport; a highly integrative, unifying and fun activity. And that’s exactly what the overly corrupt FIFA did with the 2022 Qatar World Cup – albeit through very questionable processes.
Nevertheless, when humans are in question, nothing is simple.
We are just specks of dust in a humongous universe that is complex beyond comprehension. Maybe what we observe in our lives and world affairs on a daily basis are just reflections of the quantum entanglement in the greater universe.
