There are serious questions now being raised by the manner and means by which Qatar swayed the voting nations of the international football governing body, FIFA, to award it the World Cup for 2022, the Gulf News said in an editorial on Tuesday.
ABU DHABI, (Pakistan Point News - 31st Jul, 2018) There are serious questions now being raised by the manner and means by which Qatar swayed the voting nations of the international football governing body, FIFA, to award it the World Cup for 2022, the Gulf news said in an editorial on Tuesday.
"According to documents now coming to light and published by a series of newspapers in the United Kingdom on Sunday, Qatar launched a secret campaign to seriously discredit and undermine potential rivals to host the competition then, and as a result of the press reports, there is now a growing chorus of politicians and football officials to independently investigate just how Qatar acted.
The reports consistently say that Qatar set about planning and executing a campaign of misinformation and smears against its main competitors - the US and Australia - and planted fake propaganda reports and paid campaigners to stir up opposition to the World Cup bids from Qatar’s rivals," it added.
The paper went on to say that this campaign of disinformation was well planned and secretly executed, resulting in negative publicity in media outlets in Australia and the US, and this was then used to sway FIFA officials to vote against those bids and support Qatar. "The reality is that there have always been doubts about the manner of just how Qatar’s bid to host the World Cup won."
"The logic of failing to hold what is a summer competition there aside, major football leagues around the world now have to reorganise schedules to accommodate a month-long break in November for the competition proper, plus weeks either side to allow for warm-up internationals and breaks for top players. This scheduling nightmare should be enough to warrant a rethink on the competition. For its part, FIFA too hardly has a clean record when it comes to the process by which World Cup competitions are awarded, and Qatar’s winning bid came during the shady dealings too of former FIFA president Sepp Blatter," the English language daily continued.
"Should we be surprised that Qatar has used propaganda and misinformation? Hardly. The anti-terror quartet nations of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt - countries that are unitedly standing up to the government in Doha for its support of terrorist organisations and those who spread propaganda and sedition - are well used to Qatar’s tactics, and have been speaking out against it for the past 13 months.
"The reality is that the regime in Qatar uses its international propaganda arm, Al Jazeera, to voice its policies and give a platform to individuals, charities and organisations who are intent in undermining this wider region, its governments, and setting the stage for the tentacles of the Muslim Brotherhood to gain supporters and power," the Dubai-based daily concluded.
