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Asian Angle | Calls to boycott Fifa Qatar World Cup 2022 by the West is ‘hypocritical and shameful’
- Critics in the West have condemned World Cup host Qatar for its standard of labour rights, its stand on LGBTQ issues and have called for a boycott
- Those calls to boycott the football tournament scream of Western hypocrisy, resentment and a superiority complex writes author Chandran Nair
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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 LGBTQ issues and have called for boycotts.
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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.
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