According to a bombshell report in yesterday’s Sunday Times, the tiny but disproportionately wealthy and influential peninsula state of Qatar bribed FIFA officials to the tune of $880 million in order to secure its bid to play host to the 2022 World Cup.
Per The Guardian:
The allegations were first made in a book, Whatever It Takes — the Inside Story of the Fifa Way, by a whistleblower from inside Australia’s failed 2022 bid, Bonita Mersiades, in January 2018. However, the Sunday Times said it had also seen documents showing executives from al-Jazeera had signed a TV contract that included an unprecedented success fee of $100m — which would be paid to Fifa only if Qatar won the World Cup ballot in 2010.
The documents allegedly state : “In the event that the 2022 competition is awarded to the state of Qatar, al-Jazeera shall, in addition to the…rights fee, pay to Fifa into the designated account the monetary amount of $100m.” …
The Sunday Times said it also had seen a copy of a second secret television rights contract for a further $480m that was offered by Qatar three years later — which it said was now part of a bribery inquiry by Swiss police.
The allegations are likely to lead to further suspicion as to whether Qatar played fair when it bid to host the World Cup.
As The Daily Wire has previously reported, Qatar is the foremost state sponsor of Sunni Islamism around the globe:
Along with increasingly Islamist Turkey, Qatar is one of the two chief contemporary bankrollers of extremist Sunni madrasas and insidious pro-Muslim Brotherhood academic sinecures alike. Qatar is infamous for its cozy ties with Hamas — and even with al-Qaeda. …
Qatari influence in the United States is routine and hardly abnormal. As The Daily Caller reported in December, Department of Education data show that the Qatari government has given a whopping $1 billion to American universities since 2011. According to that same Department of Education data, this represents the most money given by a foreign nation to American universities over the period 2011-2016 — ahead of substantially larger countries such as the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, China, and Canada. The top American university recipient of Qatari government donations has been Georgetown University; accordingly, the Middle East Forum has described Georgetown University’s Middle East studies faculty as “the most intolerant, ideological, anti-Israel, and pro-Islamist in the United States.”
The legitimacy of FIFA’s decision to grant the 2022 World Cup to the tiny Islamist nation has long been questioned. In 2017, The Guardian reported that “Qatar’s [World Cup host] victory, announced in December 2010 after four rounds of knockout voting by Fifa’s 22-person executive committee in Zurich, has been plagued with allegations of bribery and misconduct.” Even earlier, in 2015, Forbes reported that the successful Qatari bid for the 2022 World Cup was being investigated by Swiss authorities.
Opponents of the Islamism-supporting Qatari regime have rejoiced in The Sunday Times’ revelation of the regime’s venality. The Securities Studies Group tweeted on Saturday: “The files show that executives from the Qatari state-run broadcaster Al Jazeera signed a television contract making the huge offer as the bidding campaigns to host the World Cup were reaching a head.”
Ghanem Nuseibeh, Chair of a British group called “Muslims Against Anti-Semitism,” tweeted: “Today’s revelations are even more damaging to FIFA itself as they directly impact it. FIFA can’t ignore…this is a substantial increase of risk in relation to Qatar hosting FIFA World Cup 2022.”