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The Protests against the World Cup in Qatar
News:
There has long been criticism of Qatar's upcoming hosting of the World Cup 2022. Now, however, the criticism has begun to take the form of actual protests.
More and more national football teams have chosen to express their opposition to the miserable conditions to which construction workers in Qatar are exposed.
Due to the massive construction of football stations in preparation for the upcoming World Cup, Qatar has had slave-like conditions for the construction site workers who primarily come from Asian countries such as Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and India.
Within a few years, over 6,000 of these workers have lost their lives as a result of the grotesque and life-threatening working conditions they are exposed to on the construction site! In comparison, the Americans lost - according to official figures - 4,550 soldiers during the whole Iraq war!
Comment:
Qatar's purpose with hosting the World Cup - which it has paid huge million dollar bribes to achieve – is using the football tournament as a major PR advertisement for itself. But it has, to say the least, backfired and the opposite might be the result: one big PR nightmare that uncovers the facade behind Qatar's corrupt regime.
Like all other regimes in the Muslim world, Qatar is a secular, nationalist and racist regime. The racist discrimination between native Qataris and the guest workers from Asia evokes memories of the slave conditions to which blacks were subjected during the American slave era.
The regime uses the huge oil wealth for its own interests. These valuable resources, which in fact belong to the Muslim Ummah and not Qatar's royal family, is used carelessly in buying up expensive football clubs and holding expensive sporting events. In addition, a huge share of Qatar's oil billions is being invested in the West, much to the delight of the Western powers, instead of being invested in innovation, research and heavy industry in the Muslim world.
However, the treachery of the Qatari regime does not justify the blatant hypocrisy of European national football teams. The Dutch and German national teams, which have chosen to protest against the World Cup in Qatar, did not air the slightest criticism of the butcher from Moscow, Putin, when the World Cup was held in Russia in 2018, although Russia's massacres of Muslims in Syria were occurring in the open for everyone to see.
Political decisions, such as protesting against another country, are not made by a national team without the command of National Sports Federations, which are politically dependent; i.e. these protests are a result of a political decision taken by some Western countries.
These sports federations, however, had no comments on Russia's hosting of the Winter Olympics in 2014 or on China's upcoming hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics, despite China's brutal treatment of the Muslim Uighurs. There were also no protests against the US hosting the Ryder Cup in 2016, although it was well known at the time that the US had massacred Iraqi Muslims with chemical weapons such as white phosphorous.
The facade of so-called humanism and "human rights", which liberal European culture has been hiding behind for decades, has seriously cracked, leaving behind the unmistakable amoral and racist values for all to see. The mask of humanity fell off when the so-called refugee crisis began. Refugees are left to drown in the Mediterranean and Denmark is now sending refugees back to death in Syria.
There is clearly only one ideological alternative to the cynicism of Capitalism today: Islam and its merciful, just view of humanity, which, once the Islamic Caliphate (Khilafah) is established, will eradicate racism and the gross exploitation of people coming from poor countries.
Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Taimullah Abu-Laban