Qatar has faced a litany of criticism since 2010, when it was controversially chosen by FIFA to host the biggest soccer tournament in the world.
Gianni Infantino said he feels gay. That he feels like a woman. That he feels like a migrant worker. He lectured Europeans for criticizing Qatar’s human rights record and defended the host country’s last-minute decision to .
The FIFA president delivered a one-hour tirade , and then spent about 45 minutes answering questions from media about the Qatari government’s actions and a wide range of other topics.
“Today I feel Qatari,” Infantino said Saturday at the start of his first news conference of the World Cup. “Today I feel Arab. Today I feel African. Today I feel gay. Today I feel disabled. Today I feel a migrant worker.”
Infantino later shot back at one reporter who noticed he left women out of his unusual declaration.
“I feel like a woman,” the FIFA president responded.
Qatar has since 2010, when it was chosen by FIFA to host the biggest soccer tournament in the world.
Migrant laborers who built Qatar’s World Cup stadiums often worked long hours under harsh conditions and were subjected to discrimination, wage theft and other abuses as their employers evaded accountability, London-based rights group Equidem said in a 75-page report released this month.
“They’re like anyone else in the world,” Mustafa Qadri, founder of the Equidem organization, told CBS News this week of the migrant laborers. “You want to have a better life than your parents. You want your children to go to college to have a better life than you. So, you’re desperate for an opportunity.”
“I think hundreds of workers have died to make this World Cup possible,” Qadri added, though he admitted it’s impossible to determine a precise figure.
Infantino defended the country’s immigration policy, and praised the government for bringing in migrants to work.
“We in Europe, we close our borders and we don’t allow practically any worker from those countries, who earn obviously very low income, to work legally in our countries,” Infantino said. “If Europe would really care about the destiny of these people, these young people, then Europe could also do as Qatar did.
“But give them some work. Give them some future. Give them some hope. But this moral-lesson giving, one-sided, it is just hypocrisy.”
Qatar is governed by a hereditary emir who has absolute say over all governmental decisions and follows an ultraconservative form of Islam known as Wahhabism.
