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You may not be much of a soccer fan, and, if not, you might not know that after agreeing with that sport’s world governing body, FIFA, to allow beer sales around the stadium at this year’s World Cup as part of its bid to host the tournament, Qatar pulled the rug out from the fans suckered into travel reservations by banning beer per its long-stated national values.
The idea of soccer without alcohol seems unimaginable, particularly to folks like your author who are (to put it charitably) not fans of the game, but that’s what this year’s World Cup is reduced to.
You’d think such a bait-and-switch would have the FIFA folks throwing up their hands and moving the whole tournament elsewhere. But FIFA doesn’t have the stones to do that, and it’s a last-minute thing anyway. So they put out a mealy-mouthed statement about the beer ban, and that was it.
Statement on beer sales at #WorldCup stadiums ????️ on behalf of FIFA and Host Country ????????: pic.twitter.com/o4IEhboXks
— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) November 18, 2022
Statement on beer sales at #WorldCup stadiums ????️ on behalf of FIFA and Host Country ????????: pic.twitter.com/o4IEhboXks
— FIFA Media (@fifamedia) November 18, 2022
And just in case anyone thought that was an accident, there were the Qataris ixnaying the wearing of pro-LGBTQ armbands by team captains in a place where homosexuality is illegal. That’s made for an even bigger scandal surrounding the World Cup venue.
It feels strange to say “good for Qatar,” but actually — good for them.
Sure, they lied about the beer sales and screwed over all the soccer fans who are getting baited and switched along with FIFA. And that makes Qatar unworthy of credibility on pretty much any further topic of importance. This would serve to prove Qatar is a nation of barbarian swindlers whose claim to fame is that others showed up in their neck of the sand and pulled hydrocarbons out of the ground below their feet to make them rich.
Fine. After all, lying to infidels is not something precluded or forbidden in Qatar’s national values as expressed in Islam. So lying to the infidels at FIFA — “sure, we’ll sell beer at the stadium,” with no intention to honor that promise — while almost assuredly bribing the FIFA honchos to land the World Cup in the middle of a desert with jihadist murderers lurking everywhere, is only a bad thing if your values are Western rather than otherwise.
But Western values are shown, particularly lately, to be somewhat plastic and transactional.
So FIFA’s muckety-mucks collect some baksheesh to put the World Cup in a place no sane person would agree to put it, under a flimsy promise that said the place would be made to feel like home for Europeans and South Americans and other Westerners who’d like to quaff a cold one at a game or maybe engage in “one love” per the new hotness … only to find out that, in fact, Qatar’s national values are not so plastic and transactional.
And that they’ve all been stitched up nicely. After the Qataris already killed a couple of thousand Nepalese migrant workers building the stadiums and hotels for the event, something basically par for the course where their human rights record is concerned.
Facebook user Eliyokim Cohen of Natanya, Israel, hit this one squarely on the head…
HAHAHAHAHA, hats off to Qatar for giving perhaps the biggest middle finger to the western world in sports history. Here is a totally insane nation who won the bid for the most popular sports event in the world, promised they would abide by the rules of the tournament and sell beer at games and then a few days before the game said “ummm no alcohol it’s against our religion, what are you going to do about it”.
