Premier League Partners with Homophobic Qatari Media Group
LGBT is a nasty and dangerous ideology — BeIN Sports
BeIN Sports is a giant media group based in Qatar. It is the exclusive broadcaster of the main sports events in the MENA region (the Middle East and North Africa). It is also an official partner of big football (soccer) associations like FIFA, UEFA, and Premier League.
Since BeIN Sports is a homophobic media group, why are football’s biggest associations and leagues still collaborating with it?
During the halftime of last Sunday’s Chelsea vs Manchester United match, the channel attacked the LGBTQ+ community and the Premier League Rainbow Laces campaign.
The attack started with a statement by Mohammed Aboutrika, a former player on the Egyptian national team and an analyst BeIN Sports.
Aboutrika, who is listed on the terrorist list of the Egyptian authorities, started his attack by describing homosexuality as a sexual abnormality. This concept -sexual abnormality- is widely used in Muslim societies.
He added, “Such phenomenon does not fit our faith, and does not fit our religion [Islam].” Then he backed up his statement with an example from the Quran. He said, “ the biggest punishment that ever happened [in history] is the one Lot’s people received”.
Apparently, by mentioning Lot’s people, Aboutrika was referring to the main story in the Quran that indicates Islam’s position on homosexuality. Briefly, Lot is a prophet according to the Quran, and his people were homosexual. Because homosexuality is a sin (according to the Abrahamic Religions), Allah –God- punished them.
Loti, attributed to Lot’s story, is the Arabic translation of the word gay in English. This example shows the holy place of Lot’s story in the Muslim and Arab minds.
Abutrika mentioned the Quranic verse that celebrates God’s punishment for Lot’s people. God says, “And We made the highest part [of the city] its lowest and rained upon them stones of hard clay.” (The Qur’an, 15:74)
After his short lecture about homosexuality in Islam, Abutrika jumped to urge the Muslim clerks and theologians to sharply attack homosexuality on these occasions.
Abutrika said that homosexuality is against human nature, and he described it as a humiliation to humankind. Then he added, “We all have a role to play, to stand up against this phenomenon [homosexuality].” And he insisted on the fact that Islam fights homosexuality.
He said, “It is a dangerous ideology [homosexuality], and it is becoming nasty, and people are not ashamed of it anymore […] They will tell you that homosexuality is a human right. No! It is not a human right”.
The Daily Mail condemned the fact that the other BeIN Sports broadcasters sanctioned Abutrika’s attack on homosexuality. Nobody in the whole media group disagreed with him, which means that the giant Qatari media group adopts these ideas.
This leads us to an extensive dilemma. Since BeIN Sports is a homophobic media group, why are football’s biggest associations and leagues still collaborating with it?
BeIN Sports and Aljazeera are the biggest media groups in the Middle East and North Africa. Hundreds of millions of people from this region watch these channels. Their fame in the MENA is similar to CNN in the US and BBC in England. Just imagine the number of people that will receive Abutrika’s hate speech.
BeIN Sports and its official partners like the Premier League and FIFA are endangering the lives of millions of homosexuals in the MENA. Their situation in some radical countries like Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar is already unsafe.
The punishment for homosexuality in Islam is death. And the landslide of the MENA societies believes in the divine legitimacy of killing and oppressing homosexuals. For many Muslims, death is leisure for homosexuals; it is better for a gay to be dead than to be homosexual. That being said, Abutrika is just adding fuel to the fire.
Editor’s note: LGBTQ activists around the world have been demanding for over two years that FIFA withdraw from its agreement to host the 2022 World Cup tournament in Qatar because Qatari laws punish homosexuality with flogging, imprisonment, and death. FIFA refuses to consider relocating the tournament. Gay Olympian Tom Daley has recently added his voice to a chorus calling on international sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC to stop hosting games in nations like Russia and Qatar that refuse to honor international human rights conventions.
