High and dry

I’ve got a very simple, foul-mouthed message to football supporters arriving in Qatar for the Human Rights World Cup, only to find that alcohol sales at World Cup stadiums have been banned: serves you fucking right. If not now being able to pay £12 for a pint of bats’ piss, AKA Budweiser, has a detrimental effect on your visit, then I couldn’t be happier. What are you doing there in the first place?

Qatar has a stinkingly bad record of human rights abuse that should have disqualified it from even applying to host a World Cup, never mind hosting it. Let’s look at a few:

• Migrant workers have suffered appalling treatment and hundreds, if not thousands, have died as a result of work conditions while building football venues. That abuse could have been enough to remove Qatar from any list of prospective hosts.
• Women are at best second class citizens and are subject to appalling ‘punishments’ if they are found to be having sex outside marriage, including flogging and stoning. Given that half the world is female, why on Earth is FIFA holding a tournament in a place where women are so oppressed?
• LGBT rights? There aren’t any. Allah hates gays even more than he hates women, so lesbians had better stay at home altogether. Last week a FIFA Qatar World Cup Ambassador not, I think, David Beckham, said, homosexuality is “damage in the mind”. FIFA says people should respect the bigoted laws of the land. No. I was always taught you earned respect and those religious fanatics have done nothing to earn mine.
• There is no free press in Qatar. It’s even worse than in the UK. Journalists are not allowed to say a bad word about the place or by spreading undefined ‘false news’.

Obviously, none of that bothered FIFA, nor the hordes of fans who clearly don’t give a toss about human rights abuses and even if they do care, at least they could drink to forget. Not any more.

I never buy that ‘When in Rome’ nonsense for the simple reason I cannot, in any circumstances whatsoever, especially in the name of a God, accept wilful oppression. So I would never go anywhere near such a place and neither should FIFA have done so.

Instead, fans will have to make do with Budweiser 0%, an alcohol-free version of a terrible beer, and I hope they choke on it. I’ll do my bit for rank hypocrisy by watching the whole thing on TV, cursing this tawdry effort in sports-washing, but always consuming something far better than Budweiser.