Symbols Matter: Move The Games Out Of Qatar

In light of the tight security partnership between the two countries, the United States must now require the Qatari government to hand over the terrorists on its soil, or at least expel them. It also needs to step up efforts to definitively halt the funding and support of Islamic terror networks, even those that are “deeply ideologically tied” to the “pure Islam” of the Wahhabi movement that most Qataris practice.

Then, as punishment for Qatar’s affiliation with Hamas, the international community should ensure that all global sporting events, including the 2024 World Aquatics Championships and the 2024 F1 Qatar Grand Prix, be removed from Qatar, to be held elsewhere.

Barbarism in the name of liberating Palestine reared its ugly head during the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany, where eight Palestinian militants infiltrated the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli Olympic wrestling team, and took nine other Israeli athletes and coaches hostage. After a gun battle, German police killed most of the terrorists, but the rescue attempt failed, and all of the hostages died that day.

American Mark Spitz was the star of the 1972 Olympics, where he won seven gold medals and set seven world records in swimming. Never before had one athlete been so dominant on the global stage.

Mark Spitz was the most recognized athlete in the world at the time. He also left Germany fearing for his life because he is Jewish.

“My coach and I were put in the back seat of a car and they told me to crouch down and they put this blanket over me,” Spitz recalled to a journalist recently.

“It was like an out-of-body experience,” said Spitz, who was 22 at the time. “The feeling was, wow, it’s hard to believe that happened to the Israelis. Why would somebody do that to an innocent group of people who had only good intentions?”

My daughter is a newly minted, dual citizen of Israel and the United States, and a member of the Israeli women’s 4 x 200-meter freestyle relay team that placed 10^th at this year’s World Swimming Championships in Fukuoka, Japan. She and her team of 18 athletes spent this past summer flying to and from Israel for international events in Italy, Hong Kong, Ireland, and Japan.

Like all Israeli athletes, they traveled incognito, for fear that revealing the country they compete for would make them a terrorist target. No passport stamps and no team gear or logos on bags.

If the 2024 World Swimming Championships are not moved from Qatar, she and her teammates would miss the meet that determines their eligibility to compete in the 2024 Olympics in Paris. These athletes’ Olympic dreams would end prematurely, and for a reason they don’t deserve.

There’s precedent for boycotts on behalf of lesser crises. In the past few years, both the NBA and MLB moved their all-star game showcases away from North Carolina and Georgia respectively, due to political decisions made by the state’s lawmakers. Olympic boycotts have become fairly common.

Qatar leaders deny any assertions that they knowingly support terrorism, instead projecting themselves as the Middle East’s Switzerland, a neutral actor that can serve as a negotiating conduit between warring parties.  But their claims of neutrality require more commitment to peace than they’ve shown to date.

On October 7, 2023 – a day that changed the security landscape in the region – the indiscriminate rape, torture, and slaughter of Israeli women, children, and babies played out in front of the world’s eyes. In its official statement, the Qatari Foreign Ministry said it held Israel “solely responsible” for the bloodshed due in part to its “incursions into the Al Aqsa Mosque.”

In 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt all cut off relations with Qatar and executed a blockade, due to the latter’s close ties with Iran and its funding for Islamist militias. The protesting countries particularly feared Qatar’s powerful state-owned news network, Al Jazeera, which regularly spreads vile, propaganda-filled messages that often incite popular uprisings.

On his recent visit to the crisis region, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stopped in Qatar, in hopes of de-escalating the Gaza situation.

The U.S. has 8,000 troops stationed at the Al-Udeid Air Base, 20 miles southwest of Doha, Qatar. Following the Gulf War, the emirate spent lavishly to lure the U.S. to set up shop in their country. Since then, the Qataris have poured more than $8 billion fixing up Al-Udeid, now equipped with a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, a FOX Sports Bar, and a gym.

Importantly, Al-Udeid has become the forward headquarters of the U.S. military’s Central Command, where they oversee combat missions, surveillance flights, and drones across the Middle East, North Africa, and Asia.

Qatar’s image rinse comes in increasingly sophisticated and effective ways. In addition to hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2022, the Qatari government operates the soccer “super team,” Paris St. Germain, where both of the tournament’s top stars, Kylian Mbappe and Lionel Messi, played together. The Qatar Investment Authority has an estimated $450 billion of assets spread lavishly around the world, including stakes in Volkswagen, Credit Suisse, and the remains of Miramax.

And their help with Hamas is appreciated. Last Friday night, when Hamas released its first two hostages, Judith and Natalie Raanan, American officials quickly thanked the Qataris for their help.

But Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’ leader, has a clandestine lair in Qatar, near his organization’s shadow headquarters. He reportedly met with Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, in Doha during the week following the massacre in Israel.

As Qataris well know, the story that is told to the world matters.

During the opening ceremony for 2021 Tokyo Olympics, nearly fifty years after the Munich killings, the International Olympic Committee finally held a moment of silence to commemorate the Israeli athletes and coaches.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take the world so long to embrace the victims this time.

Martin Luther King Jr. said, “That old law about ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.”