Calls to boycott the Fifa Qatar World Cup screams of Western hypocrisy, resentment and a superiority complex writes author Chandran Nair.
«:»Ahead of this year’s Fifa World Cup in Qatar, many in the West have again assumed the moral high ground and condemned the Middle Eastern country for its standard of labour rights, its stand on LBGTQ issues and have called for boycotts. This is business-as-usual for Western media. But as Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp decried in a recent interview, the decision to select Qatar was made years ago – in Europe, where the sport’s governing body Fifa is based, and under extremely questionable circumstances that adds to the criticisms levelled against Fifa. For all who were involved to now point fingers at Qatar is sheer hypocrisy. During an interview on October 27, German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said, “There are criteria that must be adhered to and it would be better that tournaments are not awarded to such states.” By this, she means Western norms. Meanwhile in Paris, as well as other French cities, will reportedly not be televising the World Cup on giant screens in public. There were no such actions taken during the London Olympics in 2012 when the US and the UK had committed a war crime in Iraq and continued with an illegal occupation. Four successive World Cups have been granted to non-Western nations – South Africa , Brazil , Russia and now Qatar. That has never happened before, and this has irked sports administrators, politicians, media, public, and a host of economic actors in the West. If the 2022 World Cup had been awarded to the US, Spain or Australia who bid but lost, there would have been no outrage at FIFA and no suggestion that there was any wrong doing despite what we now know about how it operated for decades. In a previous article I discussed the boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics , and I mentioned Qatar 2022 as the next occurrence: “That drumbeat of righteousness with regard to the World Cup will only get louder after the Winter Olympics as another platform is sought, this time not to embarrass a competitor but to remind the world of the moral authority of the West. Wait for it.” This recurrence is being recognised in academia. One paper from the Canadian-based Balsillie School of International Affairs states that, “Calls for state-sponsored binary boycotts are likely to increase in the future, as SMEs are more regularly awarded to non-Western, powerful “outsider” states, including the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India , China , South Africa) and Middle Eastern Opec nations.
