The European Woke International of Hypocrisy and Neo-Colonialism looks past the incendiary escalation of the Ukraine conflict, preferring instead to spoil the beautiful game for hundreds of millions of soccer fans in Arab and developing countries.

Anyone who thought the media would take an in-depth look at the current and most dangerous lie in many decades was sorely mistaken. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that they were and still are busy with Qatar and soccer bashing on the occasion of the World Cup.

Although even U.S. President Biden, NATO, the Polish government and Ukrainian generals confirmed that a missile that hit Poland and caused the deaths of civilians there was fired not by the Russians but by the Ukrainians, President Zelensky continues to insist on his lie that it was fired by the Russians.

Zelensky called for the execution of NATO treaty Article 5 response, meaning hot warfare between NATO and Russia in retaliation for a Russian attack on one of the alliance members. Such a military response against Russia would have opened the gateway to hell and an internecine world war.

Whether the missile attack was an accident or even a deliberate act by Ukraine (in the interests of Zelensky and other world war-mongers) cannot be conclusively said without independent investigation. However, it is likely that the investigations will come to nothing, just as in the case of the state-terrorist act of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipeline.

Of course, if crazy, masochistic Russia had blown up its own billion-dollar gas business, the results would have been known long ago, the media would have reported on it extensively, and Russia would have been unanimously condemned.

Since the aspirations (or the “Big Lie”) of actual arsonist Zelensky, who wants to plunge the earth into an inferno and on whose coat-tails Western media and politicians hang, are not a topic, we turn to what European politicians, media and the rest of the Woke community are so busy with at the moment: Qatar, the World Cup and the human rights violations there.

The oppression of the LGBTQ community and the headscarf requirement for women in Islamic Qatar are rightly castigated, at least from the perspective of the enlightened West. For construction workers, the issue is a bit more complicated: Accidents, including fatal ones, happen on giant construction sites.

To avoid this, Europe’s Woke community should call for a worldwide ban on large construction sites, perhaps first in Germany, where Qatar-bashing is particularly intense, followed by the rest of the European Union, where abuses involving undeclared workers on construction sites are common.

Here in Asia, however, such a thing would not be enforceable, because Asians are usually pragmatists and as such are anchored in reality and are not driven by detached Western Woke ideologies (which does not mean, however, that the rights of construction workers are not slowly but surely improving here as well, and without moral lectures by Western know-it-alls).

But so that human rights violations are no longer committed on construction sites, perhaps the Woke community should have all construction activities banned. This could even fit quite well into the ecological concept of the German and other Greens in Europe.

A problem of the entire Middle East that is intentionally presented in a one-sided way?

Let’s stay in Qatar’s neighborhood for a moment: Marriage in Israel is the responsibility of the religious courts, which consider gay marriage illegal, as well as interfaith marriage. Even secular Israeli Jews overwhelmingly oppose interfaith marriages. Qatari women are allowed to marry foreigners but lose their Qatari citizenship. Qatari men, on the other hand, can now marry non-Muslim foreign women.

As the birth rate of the ultra-Orthodox skyrockets, they will form the largest population group in Israel in the not too distant future. This means that Israel will then be much more like Qatar today, while Qatar stands a good chance of becoming less homophobic and much more tolerant of interfaith marriages.

So is this a deliberately one-sided portrayal of the problem of the entire Middle East? What is certain is that, unlike Qatar, the media in Germany and the rest of Europe will show understanding for this development in the Promised Land because they have adopted the politically correct attitude that even the slightest criticism of Israel is to be considered anti-Semitic and must therefore be cancelled.

The mendacity of the European moralists and neo-colonialists

The European media also applaud America’s “unprovoked” wars, justify its economic wars (including its hunger weapon, belittlingly called “sanctions”), support its proxy war on Ukrainian soil against Russia and against the Russian-speaking minority since 2014, are not outraged by Western-backed genocides from Palestine to Yemen, but with great fanfare vilify tiny outsider Qatar for its human rights abuses.

And yes, the hypocrisy that the president of the international football association (FIFA) criticizes also has racist roots. Though the region has a century-long history with the beautiful game, the world championship in Qatar marks the first time that the Arab World, with its population of more than 440 million people, is hosting the World Cup since it began in 1930, something that the former European colonial masters seem to want to deprive them of.

Dr. Abdullah Al-Arian, historian and author of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game, explains that the game is no longer just the domain of European states and their former Latin American colonies, and that this World Cup will be accessible not only primarily to European soccer fans, but to many others as well:

People in Asia, Africa and the Middle East won’t have to contend with costly transoceanic flights or intrusive visa requirements. By contrast, one of the hosts of the next World Cup, the United States, had until recently a ‘Muslim ban’ that would have kept Iranians from being able to watch their team compete. Up to 100,000 Iranians plan to make the short flight to attend this year’s tournament.

The story of Arab football—like so much in the region—is tied up in the history of colonialism and the struggle against it. Algeria’s independence movement, known as the F.L.N., formed a team-in-exile in 1958 as part of its battle against French rule. The team competed against other national teams even before there was an independent Algeria. In Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Sudan, nationalist movements fighting for independence from colonial powers showcased football’s role in protests, the establishment of political parties and strengthening the sense of national identity. Qatar’s national league, too, predates the country’s 1971 independence from Britain by nearly a decade.

I hope I live to see the day when a World Cup opens in the UK or the U.S. and the commentator says, “Well, you can make your own thoughts about the centuries of wars and destruction, misery and slavery that the host country has brought upon the world…”

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