World Cup ambassador denounces homosexuality
An ambassador for the World Cup in Qatar has described homosexuality as a “damage in the mind” in an interview with German public broadcaster ZDF only two weeks before the opening of the soccer tournament in the Gulf state, highlighting concerns about the conservative country’s treatment of gays and lesbians.
Former Qatari national-team player Khalid Salman told a German reporter in an interview that being gay is “haram,” or forbidden in Arabic, and that he has a problem with children seeing gay people.
Excerpts of the television interview were shown Monday on the ZDF news program “Heute Journal.” The full interview, which is part of a documentary, was to be shown Tuesday on ZDF.
Germany’s interior minister condemned Salman’s remarks.
“Of course, such comments are terrible, and that is the reason why we are working on things in Qatar hopefully improving,” Nancy Faeser said Tuesday.
About 1.2 million international visitors are expected in Qatar for the tournament, which has faced criticism and skepticism ever since the gas-rich emirate was selected as host by FIFA in December 2010. Concerns about LGBTQ tourists attending the World Cup also have been expressed for a long time.
In the interview, Salman also said that homosexuality “is a spiritual harm.”
“During the World Cup, many things will come here to the country. Let’s talk about gays,” Salman said in English, which is simultaneously dubbed into German in the TV segment. “The most important thing is, everybody will accept that they come here. But they will have to accept our rules.”
The interview was cut short by a media officer of the World Cup organizing committee after Salman expressed his views on homosexuals, ZDF reported. Picking Qatar ‘a mistake’: Former FIFA President Sepp Blatter said that selecting Qatar 12 years ago to host the 2022 World Cup was a mistake.
Blatter, who was FIFA’s president at the time, again cited a meeting between then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Michel Platini, then president of European soccer body UEFA and a vice president of FIFA, for swaying key votes.
Blatter, 86, spoke with the Swiss newspaper group Tamedia in his first major interview since being acquitted with Platini in July of financial misconduct at FIFA after a trial at federal criminal court.
“It’s a country that’s too small,” Blatter said of Qatar, the smallest host by size since the 1954 tournament in Switzerland. “Football and the World Cup are too big for that. It was a bad choice. And I was responsible for that as president at the time.”
It became part of FIFA lore that an expected U.S. victory swung toward Qatar at a meeting Sarkozy hosted in Paris in the week before the Dec. 2, 2010, vote by FIFA’s executive committee.
Platini, a French soccer great who was then president of European soccer body UEFA and a vice president of FIFA, was invited by Sarkozy to his official residence. The crown prince of Qatar, now the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, was also there.
In comments to the Associated Press in 2015, Platini broadly confirmed the significance of that meeting in Paris.
“Sarkozy never asked me to vote for Qatar, but I knew what would be good,” Platini told an AP reporter in Zurich seven years ago. He acknowledged that he “might have told” American officials that he would be voting for their 2022 bid.