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I find it most interesting that Qatar is being treated like Russia in 2018. The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states. If anything the west has ignored the anti-woke nature of the Gulf states and seen it as cool place for finance, tourism and futurism. It seems like the view of these countries have massively swung in a few years to becoming fairly hostile.
Is it their cozying up to China? Is it that these countries are becoming big and influential enough to have too much free will? Is it that the hypocrisy of being liberal in the west yet doing business in Dubai has become too much?
Then you are either with us or against us attitude of elite class westerners is increasingly putting more of the world in the against us category. They aren't going to give half the world the Iran/Russia treatment and if they do the other half of the world is going to do fairly fine under an alternative system.
The western elites are currently mad at the gulf for 1) cozying up to China 2) not playing along at pretending trump is an outcast and 3) using opec to keep oil prices high during the war.
They’re also, of course, siding vocally against western sanctions on Russia.
The other factor is that elite westerners will tolerate non-elite-western values and attitudes when it’s barbarian chieftains, which is how the gulf states were perceived when they were Islamic fundamentalists with oil. But now that their economies have gotten more diverse, and they’ve retained their anti-LGBT attitudes even as they’ve gotten more secular in other ways, it’s different.
4: Slowing down the financing of terrorism. When Islam was the outgroup for the country, the elites couldn't get enough. Now that they've ceded Big Baddy territory to Russia, they're just uncivilized barbarians again. It's hard to muster support for a grubby dictatorship when they won't even murder your citizens for you.
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If you are looking at an American-centric Western view on the two host nations, I think the US team's absence (because they barely failed to qualify) had a profound impact on how most Americans who are not die-hard fans perceived the event (if at all).
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Where are you getting your impressions?
I don’t think I’ve seen any glowing coverage of these states since the Burj Khalifa went up. Complaints (with a tinge of respect!) about mega yachts and artificial palm-tree islands, a sentiment that oil wealth is ill-gotten, the odd cry of humanitarian abuses.
Qatar specifically flew under the radar until getting the World Cup, at which point the accusations started flying. They were focused on bribery, not politics or morality, and had plenty of evidence. It wasn’t a great time to work in FIFA’s PR division.
Agreed. Blue tribers clearly do not like the gulf states and think they code as red tribe(devoutly religious, oil money, paranoid blue tribe fantasy of how women are treated).
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It's a rather big stretch to include any state besides Kuwait in that statement.
You are right. The other gulf states tried to starve Qatar with a blockade not that long ago and it failed largely only thanks to Turkish support. Right afterwards Turkey also set up a large military base in the peninsula, which obviously serves to deter further aggression from the other gulf US-client states.
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"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.
Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?
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Iraq was getting the best of Iran just a few years earlier, but not by enough to prevent them from accepting a ceasefire with little permanent gain, and not by such a large margin that you'd think they were an existential threat to the whole region.
I can't blame anyone for treating them like an existential threat anyway. "Murderous dictator builds rapidly-expanding war machine and uses weak revanchist excuses to start salami-slicing his neighbors" was an uncomfortably familiar story, and "everybody just sits back and hopes that he'll be satisfied after a few slices and stop and reform" was no longer considered to be a safe way to bring it to a conclusion.
Sure, but if Kuwait didn’t have oil- and hadn’t been very firmly willing to play nice with the West about its sale- the reaction wouldn’t have been military intervention, it would’ve been an angsty op Ed in the NYT and a strongly worded letter submitted to the UN, which would then approve it.
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It's entirely because they have the World Cup. You don't see anyone really going after the likes of Kuwait or the UAE.
Yes, and because for the past few years FIFA has waded quite heavily into moralizing politics (mostly as a cover for their own corruption). If FIFA had spent the years of the lead-up to Russia endlessly promoting the inviolable sovereignty of nations, people would have been more critical of the location in 2018. Well FIFA has been vocally supportive of LGBT rights leading up to this World Cup. The hypocrisy is so readily apparent that it even offends people who don't normally wade into these kind of culture war issues.
The next World Cup is in Texas, which will likely pass a set of laws against ‘grooming’ by the time it starts, too.
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Perhaps they've been vocally supportive precisely because they're going to Qatar?
They were criticized for it, obviously. Of course, if they said nothing they'd be criticized too so they took some face-saving measures.
This is essentially the same dynamic going on with the teams that wanted the "OneLove" armband: everyone knew they were complicit and supporting an anti-LGBT regime in practice so, in true performative fashion, they wanted some nice iconography to wash away this sin. But Qatar wouldn't even let them have that.
I mean, this isn't new.
They basically appropriated the theme of love from Christianity, ignoring literally everything else in the faith (including just why love is important*) that is inimical to their worldview
Why wouldn't they do it to Bob Marley too?
* It's not about hedonism or even freedom to choose romantic relationships...
? I'm pretty sure Christianity didn't invent love or ever have any rightful monopoly on it.
Christianity invented very few things, once you actually start digging into it. But it popularized plenty.
Philosophy schools were opposed to the infanticide found in the ancient world, like the Christians. But who would argue that we owe the disgust of this (to the point where the easiest way to lose an abortion debate is to bite the bullet on "why a fetus but not a newborn baby? They're both not particularly sapient...") to some philosophy school and not the Church?
Monogamy might have been a practice somewhere, but it certainly owes a debt to Paul.
The idea of agape, love-as-central is very Christian. A central idea of Christianity is summed up in John 3:16, one of the most famous verses in the Bible, the Gospel in a nutshell: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son": Divine love is made manifest in the incarnation and the death of God to save us from sin, that's how much he allegedly loves everyone.
"God is love", for example, is something I hear a lot in the West. I tend to hear a lot of progressive policies pushed in the name of "Jesus loved everyone" and "love is love" and so on, so they're very aware of the perception.
IIRC Christian philosophers like Swinburne even make arguments defending other central elements of Christianity via the concern for love: e.g. a loving God would be a Trinity since that is a "'perfect love" - a singular God has no mutual love, a dual pair can be selfish since they'll only focus on one another (don't ask me to defend this, I find everything about the Trinity dubious). Suffice it to say, this is the sort of argument that doesn't occur to the other sons of Abraham.
In my religious education -as a Muslim- love was not specifically emphasized as a value uber alles . Similarly, nobody went around arguing for anti-Islamic things because "Mohammed loved everyone" but I notice that progressive Muslims raised in the West often speak in similar tones to the Christians. If Muslims, why not people who aren't recent transplants?
Well, I'll admit you have a point. Love-as-universalism is definitely a theme leftists invoke, and you're correct that Christianity probably popularized it more than any other ideology in the West (which, in my view, is not to its credit, but that's neither here nor there).
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