Qatar is having a fairly good time watching the world come to its manufactured doorstep and pay tribute to the tiny nation.
That’s what you’re doing in case you are in Qatar, paying 1000’s of {dollars} to look at the World Cup in individual, and even in case you are watching on Fox Sports activities, which might lead you to imagine that this occasion is happening in Disney World.
It’s just like the movie “The Mouse That Roared,” a few fictional little nation in Europe that declared battle on america to keep away from chapter, with one distinction. They flexed their muscle groups as a result of they had been broke. Qatar is flexing its muscle groups as a result of they paid for the correct to take action.
You wish to come to our nation? You higher play by our guidelines. You wish to protest and wave your flag of humanity? Do it from a jail cell.
Hey, Budweiser, you paid hundreds of thousands for the rights to promote beer at World Cup video games? Too dangerous. You’ll promote beer the place we are saying we will.
We’re Qatar. We got here to play, child — paid $220 million for this opportunity, greater than twice the previous eight World Cups mixed. We spied (hiring a former CIA agent who spied on their rivals), we bribed and we spilled blood — between 400 and 500 migrant staff, in line with Hassan Al-Thawadi, the secretary-general of Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Supply and Legacy, who got here up with that quantity in an interview with British hack Piers Morgan.
That clearly was the warped acceptable quantity he got here up with for public consumption, and affordable folks can conclude the variety of deaths constructing their World Cup empire was nearer to the 1000’s human rights activists claimed of their accounts of the human prices of Qatar’s value for worldwide respect.
The Mouse That Roared has come a great distance from the times after they had been a laughingstock in entrance of the world on the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
Not lots of people heard about Qatar when the weightlifting competitors started on the 2000 Summer time Olympics. However they’d taken the weightlifting group by storm when in 1999, they had been all of a sudden a powerhouse, successful three gold medals, one silver and three bronze on the 1999 World Championships.
However simply earlier than the competitors was about to start, an Olympic press official walked into the press room and stated, “The weightlifters from Qatar who had been scheduled to compete at the moment have withdrawn from the Video games. Evidently they ate outdoors of the Olympic village final evening and are affected by diarrhea.”
It turned out that the diuretic the Bulgarians took causes diarrhea. Additionally it is taken to masks the presence of steroids in drug assessments and to drop extra pounds to compete in a decrease class. One of many Qataris — Fadul Yasif — competed all 12 months internationally at 94 kilograms. He was entered within the 85-kilo class right here.
The official motive given for the diarrhea was that the weightlifters ate some dangerous meals. Nevertheless it was all Yousef A Al-mana, president of the Qatar Weightlifting Federation, may do to maintain a straight face when questioned by reporters in a hallway outdoors the press room. “They’re in dangerous situation, from meals or one thing else,” he stated. The staff physician was standing subsequent to him, however when reporters requested if they might converse to him, Al-mana stated, “No, he would possibly provide the proper reply, which could possibly be the fallacious reply.”
It was like one thing out of a Marx brothers film.
A number of hours earlier, the Bulgarian weightlifting staff had been kicked out of the Olympics for optimistic drug assessments. Why is that this related? The Qatar weightlifting staff had been truly Bulgarians.
Two years earlier, when Qatar determined it wished to make a reputation for itself in worldwide sports activities, they went to the Bulgarians and requested if they’d any weightlifters to promote. For $1 million, they purchased eight Bulgarian weightlifters who then grew to become Qataris. In the course of the drug-stained Olympics, this was a second good for a number of laughs.
Lots of people had been laughing on the obscure little Center East nation then. They aren’t laughing now. They could be disgusted. However they don’t seem to be laughing. There’s nothing humorous about Qatar now.
⦁ You’ll be able to hear Thom Loverro on The Kevin Sheehan Present podcast.
