"Respect our culture! Tolerant Westerners, my butthole."
Doha, December 8 - Fans and officials from around the region reacted to the surprise over their expressions of animus toward Jews at the World Cup by bashing Westerners for the "racist" characterization of that hatred as wrong, and accused Westerners of hating Muslims by harboring such opinions.
Scenes of passers-by accosting or assaulting Jews for daring to wave the flag of their home country - as attendees from every country often do at the World Cup - as well as recordings and accounts of cab drivers refusing to take people to their destinations upon discovering the passengers' Jewish identity, and an official ban on selling kosher food or engaging in Jewish prayer - have prompted criticism from American, European, and other countries, even from quarters that normally dismiss antisemitic phenomena as mere opposition to Israeli policies. Qatari and other Arab voices responded with outrage to the criticism, calling it a gross display of Islamophobia, as antisemitism remains an integral element of local culture.
"It's like their criticism of our treatment of homosexuals," railed Azam Ghasseb, a fan from Saudi Arabia who participated in two separate mass-harassments of Israeli journalists. "We have different moral systems. They want to corrupt ours with their moral standards, which are obviously filthy and too permissive for any truly enlightened society. Same thing with the Jews. Our culture teaches us, rightly, to suspect and hate Jews, while Westerners' degenerate culture doesn't care whether someone's Jewish or gay or whatever. Even both! Probably both, come to think of it. Well, not here. Those permissive sensibilities, and the criticism of anyone who doesn't share those immoral sensibilities, are the height of Islamophobia. Respect our culture! Tolerant Westerners, my butthole."
Government and government-controlled media figures in the region expressed similar critiques of the criticism of Arab antisemitism. "The decadent West might find Jewish perfidy and settler-colonialism acceptable," intoned a commentator on Lebanese television. "We, however, who constitute the chief victims of that treachery and aggression, take the more responsible view that Jews deserve all the animosity and opposition we can muster against them. Any attempt to restrict, restrain, or cast such protective opposition in a negative light constitutes opposition to Islam, the defining element in this region's culture."
"It's enough that we were forced to rid ourselves of the Jews among us," he continued, referring to the mass expulsions of Jews from Arab countries following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and its expanded territorial hold in a defensive war in 1967. "Now you want to make us feel bad about it? Ridiculous and racist."