Argentina's gloriously gifted footballers in their famous sky blue and white stripes pumped the ball desperately into Saudi Arabia’s penalty area, hoping to tie the score. It was an astonishing upset against a soccer superpower. And for one moment, in the 12 years of arguments and bitter criticism since Qatar won the right to hold the FIFA 2022 World Cup, talk about the tournament was about soccer. 

It was how the organizers of this World Cup must have dreamed it would play out. A full and raucous stadium. Compelling action on the grass. Pan-Arab euphoria. An underdog victory that would clinch the argument that FIFA was right in 2010 to award the World Cup to a tiny petrostate with no meaningful football history, no suitable stadiums and not enough hotel rooms, and with labor practices so exploitative and grim that to discuss them you have to reach for terms like "human trafficking" and "slavery." 

The most vocal opponents of Qatar 2022 are human rights organizations that have documented the Emirate’s brutal repression of LGBTQ people, deadly exploitation of migrant workers and use of slaves. 

Qatar has erected a communications strategy to fight back against the mountains of evidence that it engages in precisely these practices by invoking the values its critics claim to value most: anti-racism and anti-colonialism. Last month, Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, told a meeting of Qatari legislators that the country had been subjected to an "unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced." It has been rife with "fabrication and double standards," he added, and has "reached a level of ferocity" that has raised suspicions about the "real reasons and motives behind this campaign." 

The FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, in an unhinged hour-long address to the media, went further. "I think," he said, "for what we Europeans have been doing in the last 3,000 years, around the world, we should be apologizing for the next 3,000 years before starting to give moral lessons to people." Infantino also accused Qatar's, and FIFA's, critics of "pure racism." 

Qatar’s public relations strategists and state-sponsored publications have aggressively promoted the idea that criticism of Qatar amounts to Islamophobia and racism against the Arab world. Writing in the Middle East Eye, Feras Abu Helal pointed out a British government press release celebrating nearly $2 billion in contracts secured by British firms to help with everything “from building new stadiums to cutting the grass and providing pitch-side security guards.” British expats, and Westerners generally, Abu Helal added, “are among the biggest beneficiaries of the unfair and unjust wage distribution in Gulf states, including Qatar.”

The global media spotlight was part of the reason Qatar wanted to host the World Cup. Football is a key component of the sportswashing efforts of Gulf countries like Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. Their investments in a handful of European clubs, with the full backing of European governments and football associations, have helped distort the game so profoundly that these superclubs no longer want the hassle of competing with the lesser lights in their countries as they have for over a century, yearning instead to reap billions from supranational quasi-exhibition games held in elephantine stadiums from Almaty to Zhengzhou.

It's not media attention that bothers Qatar, it’s losing control of the narrative.

Qatar has spent an astonishing amount of money to host the World Cup. First to ensure it was awarded the tournament and then to build the infrastructure necessary to host it — including a metro service, expanded airport and, to the north of the capital Doha, a brand new city in the desert that will eventually be home to 200,000 people. The organizers have spent an estimated $300 billion since 2010 to show Qatar off to the world. According to the discredited and corrupt former president of FIFA, Sepp Blatter, Qatar even bought fighter jets from France so that French football officials would feel pressure to vote for Qatar's World Cup bid.

In exchange for its huge financial outlay, Qatar had expectations. Instead came the onslaught of criticism. A young Qatari woman we spoke to said that "specifically Westerners, like Americans and British people, have been milking the shit out of human rights violations." She was expressing the deep resentment many in Qatar feel at criticism they believe is “fueled by racism and hatred.”

“The West has a way of critiquing the Arab world and the Middle East whenever they have the opportunity, like there’s a target on our back,” a young Lebanese man who has lived in Qatar all his life told us.

Outside of Europe, many share the belief that Qatar is being singled out as much because of Eurocentrism and Orientalism as concern for labor rights. Gary Lineker, the former England striker and top scorer in the 1986 World Cup, opened the BBC's coverage of Qatar 2022 by describing it as "the most controversial World Cup in history."

The World Cup has been held in Mussolini's Italy, Videla's Argentina and, last time around, in Putin's Russia. 

In India, the Telegraph newspaper's editorial board responded with a sternly-worded rebuke to Western critics: "Qatar must be held accountable. But by holding it to standards no previous host has been held to, the West is revealing more about its biases than about authorities in Doha." On the Al Jazeera website, Tafi Mhaka, a Johannesburg-based columnist, wrote that "most Africans will stand with Qatar as it hosts the World Cup." Al-Jazeera is funded by the Qatari state. 

And U.S. anchor Ayman Mohyeldin on the left-wing network MSNBC criticized the "bombastic accusations" and "hyperbolic headlines," writing that "people have rightfully grown increasingly frustrated by Western moral arrogance and self-righteousness."

Happy to bask in paid-for praise from the likes of David Beckham, Qatari authorities become belligerent when asked uncomfortable questions. "Culture" and "custom" are wielded as weapons with which to silence dissent, as if to criticize homophobia or the treatment of women is the same as criticizing Arab or Muslim values, to criticize the authorities is to criticize the people and to criticize the lack of labor rights is to hypocritically ignore all rights violations in all other countries.

"Personally," says Andrew Ross, a professor at New York University who has written extensively on labor issues in the Gulf, “I don’t know anyone who's worked on these issues who isn't also critical of labor and human rights violations in the U.S.” Ross is barred from entering the UAE, where NYU has a campus, because of his work on the treatment of migrant labor.

The uncomfortable fact for the Qatari authorities is that the country's ability to host the World Cup at all is owed to the work of hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers, largely from South Asia. These workers, as has been exhaustively documented, have been treated as indentured slaves. They're lied to, their passports are taken from them, they live in squalid conditions, they're underpaid and underfed, and they work in unsafe conditions both in terms of extreme weather and inadequate safety gear and protocols.

In response, Qatar has pointed to reforms it has made in consultation with the International Labor Organization since 2018, eight years after it was awarded the World Cup. Among its reforms was the institution last year of a minimum wage for workers of about $275 a month, or less than $3,500 a year in a country where the estimated per capita GDP is about $82,000. Quibbling over the exact numbers of worker deaths or "misleading" statistics seems like a tactic of distraction when you consider how awful conditions are in general.

Nonetheless, Amnesty International is attempting to persuade the Qatar government to pay up to $440 million in compensation to workers' families. Freedom United, which describes itself as "the world's largest community dedicated to ending human trafficking and modern slavery," commissioned a film by the Belgian-based Fledge as a call to action to back the movement to provide monetary compensation to families.

Diederik Jeangout, who made the minute-long film, told me that it "shows that every time a footballer falls during the tournament is an invitation to us to commemorate the workers who fell during the construction of the tournament's infrastructure." The players' faces in the film are pixelated to draw attention to the anonymity of the workers who died, to the absence of any record.

The Amnesty campaign, social media assets like Jeangout's film and other messaging infuriate the Qatari authorities. The country's labor minister has dismissed World Cup human rights campaigns. Describing "every death as a tragedy," the minister went on to ask reporters: "Where are the victims, do you have the names of the victims, how can you get these numbers?" He told the AFP news agency that Qatar's critics "know very well about the reforms that have been made, but they don't acknowledge it because they have racist motivations."

But labor reforms and regulations, argues NYU professor Ross, “are only good insofar as they are implemented.” There has to be a monitoring system, he told us, “because a lot of these declarations are lip service and rhetoric.” 

The deployment of racism as a counter to Western criticism of Qatar's labor practices is "breathtakingly cynical," Mukul Kesavan, a writer and columnist in New Delhi, said, "when you consider the racism so endemic to Qatar's labor practices." But Kesavan also argues that the "outrage of Western commentators shows a complete lack of self-awareness." Part of the reason Gulf states including Qatar "are so despised," he said, is because "they unmask the ease with which currency and respectability can be bought in the West." 

As Ross bluntly puts it: “They’re very, very rich and people want their money.” 

Western critics who "feel the need to periodically pay obeisance to their better selves," Kesavan told us, "ought to acknowledge that they are part of a sporting ecology that courts this money."He describes the nation-states of the Gulf as "imposters of modernity." With the World Cup, like the gleaming cityscapes designed by name-brand architects, the overseas campuses of prestigious American universities and the restaurants opened by celebrity chefs, "the Gulf is holding a mirror to the developed West and it doesn't like what it sees.”

Many who deplore the bias of Western coverage of the Qatar World Cup ask if the plight of laborers, not to mention domestic workers, will be of any interest to the West once the tournament is over. Will the rights of women and gay people in Qatar and the region matter any more? 

But the same question can be turned back onto Qatar. Will the World Cup only be remembered for that November 22 game in the sunshine at the Lusail stadium — around which a whole city of new buildings is being attached like barnacles on a whale — when Saudi Arabia beat Argentina and most every Arab, maybe even most every Muslim, felt a surge of pride? Or will the criticism, racist or not, prompt some self-reflection?

Right now, though, it seems everyone’s checking off their talking points but no one’s doing much listening. 

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The Gulf country is under a disinformation attack once again. According to a Daily Beast investigation released earlier this week, fake journalist personas published “Middle East hot takes” in op-eds for 46 different right-leaning publications, including Newsmax and Washington Examiner. Many of the articles criticized Qatar and heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates, while pushing for a tougher line on Iran and Turkey. 

The digital propaganda campaign used stolen avatars and AI-generated headshots to create fictitious authors. The avatars employed photos of real people but cropped and mirror image reversed the pictures in an attempt to thwart detection. Fake biographies, academic credentials, LinkedIn profiles, and Twitter accounts added plausibility. 

The Daily Beast investigation revealed that the network of fabricated contributors endorsed similar viewpoints in more than 90 articles: criticism of Qatar’s state-funded news outlet, Al Jazeera, a demand for stricter sanctions against Iran, and praise for the United Arab Emirates’ response to Covid-19. 

One op-ed in The Asia Times, a Hong Kong-based English language news outlet, condemned Qatar for using —  ironically enough — disinformation to paint itself as “a liberal mecca in a sea of conservative, regressive regimes.” Another opinion piece on fake news and political discourse by a fake journalist was titled, “How Qatar is using Disinformation Tactics to Attack its Rivals.” 

“These kinds of statements are created to build a narrative,” said Kiran Nazish, a Middle East analyst and professor of politics and media at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. “The whole point is to create leverage against a country,” she said in a phone interview. 

Qatar has been under a land, sea and air blockade since June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain severed diplomatic links with the gas-rich country, after years of foreign policy disagreements.

Nazish said that any propaganda campaign against Qatar strengthens the blockade and builds momentum for Saudi and Emirati foreign policy. 

“It gives adrenaline to the anti-Qatar lobby because Qatar is instrumental in foreign policy with Iran. It’s about who has regional power in the Middle East and who has economic power globally,” she said. 

Though many of the articles have been taken down and accompanying Twitter accounts deleted, the incident shows how sophisticated disinformation campaigns can go undetected. “Disinformation is the great tool that everyone is free to use,” added Nazish.

Photo by AFP via Getty Images

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On Monday, thousands of Twitter accounts retweeted a doctored video claiming that gunshots had been fired in the coastal Qatari city of Al Wakrah. The footage alleged that a plan to overthrow the ruling Al-Thani family was underway. At least two other videos featuring audio of gunshots pushed similar narratives. 

The videos mark the latest in a new round of attacks against Doha. Last week, an article published by the Saudi Gazette alleged that a member of the Qatari ruling family had called on Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani to step down. 

Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, was the first to discover that the videos had been manipulated and audio tracks of gunshots had been dubbed onto the footage. 

Jones published a thread showing his Twitter analysis of a disinformation campaign that employed the Arabic hashtags “Al Wakra” and “Coup in Qatar.” Jones found the two hashtags had been tweeted, retweeted and replied to in some 20,700 posts from around 12,000 unique accounts. He also found a pattern of “sockpuppets” — fake accounts often employed for disinformation purposes. According to Jones, each sockpuppet had retweeted the false stories 22 times.

The narrative of the “fake coup” was also given some legitimacy by a number of high-profile news organizations, including The Independent Arabia, a Saudi offshoot of the British newspaper The Independent. 

“I think you can tie these disinformation campaigns with events taking place in Saudi Arabia that we’re not aware of,” said Jones, in a telephone interview. “The sense I get is that it is aimed at domestic audiences in Saudi, to distract them from the economic situation there and the spread of the coronavirus.”

Jones added that the claims were likely to be designed to reinforce the policy of ostracization pursued against Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt.  

“This is an attempt to legitimize the blockade, the reasons for it, and the effect it has had on people's lives,” he explained.

The geographical and diplomatic isolation of Qatar began during Ramadan in June 2017, when the four countries cut ties with Doha, after years of disputes about its foreign policy. 

The quartet later issued a 13-point ultimatum, stating that Doha should shutter its media operations — including the broadcaster Al Jazeera — and submit to monthly external compliance checks. Qatar was given 10 days to comply with the demands or face unspecified consequences.

In the years since the blockade was launched, Qatar has faced numerous accusations from Saudi Arabia and the UAE of supporting terrorism and, more recently, of spreading the coronavirus. Armies of Twitter accounts have been established to work alongside UAE and Saudi media organizations in an often brazen disinformation campaign against Doha.

Gulf experts have quickly debunked this week’s “fake coup” as part of an ongoing program aimed at undermining the authority of the Qatari ruling family. 

“This sudden spike in activity seems to have returned to the same ground that triggered the blockade in 2017 — a fake news bubble which then becomes a pretext for further action,” said Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of Qatar and the Gulf Crisis. 

“It is bizarre and a repetition of what happened three years ago, in terms of timing and tone and content. It also flies against reason when the initial attempt to blockade Qatar in 2017 failed to win results and created antagonisms in the region.”

This latest round of disinformation ends any hope of an imminent resolution to the Gulf dispute. Qatar withdrew from recent attempts to negotiate a settlement earlier this year. 

At the time, Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, said, “Unfortunately, efforts did not succeed and were suspended at the beginning of January, and Qatar is not responsible for this.”

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Last week, Noura Almoteari — a Saudi Arabia-based journalist — posted on Twitter, saying that Qatar has known about the existence of COVID-19 since 2015. Earlier this month, she accused Doha of paying billions to China “to grow the virus.” She also coined the Twitter hashtag “Qatar is corona,” which has now been used hundreds of times on the platform. Almoteari stated that the country was spreading the virus in order to damage both the UAE’s upcoming Expo 2020 and Saudi Arabia’s future plans to diversify into a post-oil economy.

In addition to this, Qatar has come under attack from Twitter bot accounts that blame the country for the coronavirus outbreak. In January and February, numerous fake Twitter profiles advanced the theory that Qatar was responsible for spreading the virus to Argentina. The accounts have since been suspended.

The land, sea and air blockade of Qatar began in June 2017, when Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain severed diplomatic links with the gas-rich country, after years of rancor over Doha’s foreign policy.

The blockading quartet issued a list of demands, which seemed designed to turn Qatar into a client state. The orders included that Doha cut all ties with the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist movements, and that it shutter its media operations, including the broadcaster Al Jazeera. 

In the years since the blockade was launched, Qatar has faced repeated accusations from Saudi Arabia and the UAE of supporting terrorism. Armies of Twitter accounts and carefully orchestrated disinformation campaigns have become a prominent and ongoing feature of this diplomatic quarrel.

“The coronavirus campaign against Qatar began online as early as January, long before the current corona outbreak,” said Marc Owen Jones, assistant professor of Middle East Studies and Digital Humanities at Hamad bin Khalifa University in Doha, in a phone interview with Coda Story. 

“There were definitely some early disinformation campaigns on Twitter, which were basically saying that Qatar was responsible for the coronavirus, and that it had played a role in spreading it. People are trying to preempt the crisis and exploit it politically.”

The disinformation campaign has also targeted Qatar’s labor camps — institutions common in Gulf nations, which house thousands of low-paid migrant workers. One Saudi newspaper has published a number of stories about the outbreak of COVID-19 affecting “hundreds” of people in the industrial areas outside Doha, where many of Qatar’s 1.9 million migrant workers live.

Qatar’s Ministry of Public Health says the total number of reported coronavirus cases in the country currently stands at 481. 

“I would say this is a continuation of the verbal barrage of misinformation and disinformation that is part of the Qatar blockade,” said Dr Sanam Vakil, a senior research fellow with the Middle East & North Africa Programme at Chatham House in London. “In this current iteration, it accuses the Qataris of spreading the virus. This will continue for quite a degree of time, and these sorts of campaigns are a reflection of how deep seated the tensions are.”

Vakil said the disinformation about Qatar echoed how other countries are trying to internationalize the cause of COVID-19. In recent days, China has sought to blame the U.S.; earlier this month, Bahrain accused Iran of “biological aggression” by covering up the spread of the coronavirus.

“While it is interesting these bots are blaming Qataris, I think it is part of a nationalist impulse that is not just unique to the Gulf in using an external crisis to whip up support,” Vakil added.

Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, author of “Qatar and the Gulf Crisis,” believes that the outpouring of digital disinformation about Qatar on Twitter must at least have the tacit approval of authorities in countries like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, where social media is closely monitored. 

“The fact that such comments have been made by high-profile individuals in Saudi Arabia and the UAE without facing any official censure suggests that their messaging carries the implicit approval of authorities, who are in other circumstances extremely quick to police and respond harshly to commentaries that they do not agree with,” he said.

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