Real Football Podcast Episode 5: World Cup & International Cup Fiasco

Real Football Podcast Episode 5: World Cup & International Cup Fiasco

By : Real Football Podcast

Real Football Podcast Episode 5 

World Cup & International Cup Fiasco


In episode 5 of the Real Football Podcast our hosts dive into the abundance and normalcy of chaos in World Cup football. Hosts and guests will also discuss the sources of discord from autocratic hosts, diplomatic spats, to Qatar’s currently known issues. Also to be addressed are the expansion of the World Cup tournament, Newcastle’s newfound Saudi wealth, “what in the world is going for this year's Africa Cup of Nations,” and the last shot at glory for a generation of players.

Much of the coverage about Qatar hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup has been negative due to the country’s labor practices, political system, and the lack of human rights. However, Qatar as a problematic host is far from unique. From brutal military juntas, political infighting by South American and European Nations, to two tournaments canceled by Hitler, the history of World Cup hosting is as sordid as any political thriller. The continental tournaments of Europe, South America, and Africa all taking their cues from FIFA also revel in bumbling, and will be explored as well in this episode, as well as why though every member of the Real Football Podcast team loves football, none of them should want their nation to host!


Guests 


Abdullah Al-Arian
 is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University`s School of Foreign Service in Qatar and the author of Answering the Call: Popular Islamic Activism in Sadat`s Egypt (Oxford, 2014). During the fall of 2014, he was also a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Middle East Studies at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He is co-editor of Jadaliyya`s Critical Currents in Islam page.

Elie Haddad

Khalid Namez is an experienced IT professional who provides technical guidance to the magazine.


Thomas Serres
 has a PhD in political science from the EHESS. He is currently an associated researcher with Développement & Société in Paris and an Adjunct Professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz.  His research focuses on the politics of crisis and trans-nationalization in Algeria.

Hosts


Bassam Haddad
 is Director of the Middle East Studies Program and Associate Professor at the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs (SPGIA) at George Mason University. 

Matt Atteberry is a George Mason alumnus who eats, breathes, and sleeps football. Just don’t ask him to play because he’s clumsier than newborn deer on ice skates. When he’s not complaining about defenders, drawing formations, or looking up obscure facts, he’s reading a book with a cup of coffee. Come on You Spurs.

Future episodes will address a variety of topics, including Women’s Football Matters, MLS Woes, the State of Arab National Teams, and more. Should you have any comments or contributions, please send an email to info@stastushour.com.

For more from Status/الوضع, visit www.statushour.com and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes!

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412