Woke FIFA Boss Says West Should Apologise for ‘3,000 Years’ Before Criticising Sharia Qatar

ZURICH, SWITZERLAND - MARCH 18: FIFA president Gianni Infantino speaks during a press conf
Valeriano Di Domenico/Getty Images
Kurt Zindulka

The West should apologise for its history for “3,000 years” before taking aim at the continuing human rights abuses, including modern slavery, seen in the Islamist kingdom of Qatar, the president of FIFA said.

Speaking from Doha, Gianni Infantino, the president of the governing body for international football (soccer) accused people in Western nations of “hypocrisy” for highlighting the human rights record of the Sharia-governed governed country, asserting that because historical wrongs were committed in other countries, they don’t have the moral standing to call out modern slavery today.

“We have been taught many lessons from Europeans and the Western world. I am European. For what we have been doing for 3,000 years around the world, we should be apologising for the next 3,000 years before giving moral lessons… This one-sided moral lesson is just hypocrisy. I wonder why no-one recognises the progress made here since 2016,” he grovelled.

“If Europe really cares about the destiny of these people, they can create legal channels — like Qatar did — where a number of these [migrant] workers can come to Europe to work. Give them some future, some hope.”

Infantino, whose family immigrated to Switzerland from Italy prior to his birth, added: “Of course I am not Qatari, Arab, African, gay, disabled or a migrant worker. But I feel like them because I know what it means to be discriminated and bullied as a foreigner in a foreign country,” he claimed.

“Today I have strong feelings. Today I feel Qatari, I feel Arab, I feel African, I feel gay, I feel disabled, I feel a migrant worker,” the FIFA boss said.

The comments from Infantino, which are rooted in modern leftist ideology, come despite the fact that his homeland of Switzerland never engaged in the practice of colonialism or indeed the slave trade, while also ignoring the Arabic slave trade, which lasted longer and enslaved many more Africans than the Atlantic slave trade in the West.

Indeed, while an estimated 12.5 million Africans were put into slavery in the Americas, up to 17 million people were taken from Africa by Muslim slavers. Some have also agued that the Arabic slave trade, which lasted for 700 more years than the Western slave trade, was more brutal, given the propensity of Arabic slave traders using castration to turn millions of African boys into eunuchs.

The Arabs were also no strangers to colonialism — indeed, Sicily, in Infantino’s ancestral homeland of Italy, was subjugated by Muslim conquerors for hundreds of years.

The decision by FIFA to choose Qatar as the host of this year’s World Cup has been fraught with controversy from the outset, with the notoriously corrupt football body being accused by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) of taking bribes from the Qataris in exchange for hosting rights.

Human rights organisations and activists have also criticised the move, given the well-documented abuse suffered by an estimated 30,000 migrant workers.

A 2021 report from The Guardian newspaper claimed that at least 6,500 migrant workers from South-East Asian nations such as Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka have died in Qatar over the past decade constructing World Cup stadiums and other venues in perilous conditions such as extreme heat, while others are said to have perished from “asphyxiation due to hanging”.

The report notes that the true death toll was likely much higher, given the figures from 2020 were not included and because the paper was unable to secure figures from other migrant-origin countries including Kenya and the Philippines.

Qatar, for its part, has consistently attempted to brush aside concerns over its hosting of the World Cup as racism from the West.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

COMMENTS

Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.