With just a little over a month until 2022 ends,Last Week Tonight with John Oliveraired its season finale with what is (hopefully) the year’s last story: The Qatar World Cup. It’s pretty easy to see how the choice to select the controversial country as host makes no sense, but the episode delved a little further to expose even more stories surrounding the country’s approach to the event and how FIFA dealt with it. Spoiler alert: They didn’t.
Before flying to Qatar, however,John Oliverdedicated some time to talk about the mess at Twitter. If you use the social network, you’re well aware of what’s going on, but you might have not gotten theElon Muskmemo which provided the world-changing announcement that “comedy is now legal on Twitter” – this comes from the same guy that took an actual sink to Twitter HQ so that the fact that he was now head of Twitter could “sink in.” Of course, after letting go of over 50% of his new employees and making it pretty clear that he has no idea how to run a social network, Musk realized that having to work overnight to keep a company alive is no joke.
Why Qatar Shouldn’t Even Be Considered as Host In The First Place
In the main story, Oliver made the point that, at the time when Qatar was voted as the 2022 host country for the Soccer World Cup, there were already blatant issues to selecting the country: It lacked the infrastructure and the country has a scorching hot summer, during which temperatures can get up to 125° F. FIFA was fully aware of it, but didn’t care. True enough, these problems could be bypassed – and changing the event to November (winter in Qatar) was one of the solutions. But the issues hardly stopped there.
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Quatar’s record-time building of infrastructure to host a World Cup had a massive cost: Migrant workers from Nepal, India, and Bangladesh flew in (at their own expense) and had to endure subhuman housing conditions while working on the project – a system known as “kafala”, which is basically modern-day slavery. When confronted with this information,Khalid Al-Sulaiteen(one of the heads of Qatar’s leading sports organizations) just up and left in the middle of an interview because he didn’t know how to respond.
Women’s Rights and LGBTQIA+ Rights Are Virtually Non-Existent
And that’s not the end of it: Since the episode has a limited runtime, they can’t properly dive into the country’s human rights issues, and how it deals with women’s rights and the LGBTQIA+ community. As one interviewee puts it: Even if Qatar says LGBTQIA+ people are welcome to attend the world cup, it’s the equivalent of going to a dinner party in which you know there are kids being held in the basement.
