When the singer Rod Stewart was offered more than $1 million to perform in Qatar, he said, he turned it down.
“It’s not right to go,” Mr. Stewart told the The Sunday Times of London recently, joining a string of public figures to declare boycotts or express condemnation of Qatar as the Gulf nation hosts the soccer World Cup.
In the prelude to the tournament, which started this past weekend, Qatar has faced an increasing barrage of criticism over its human rights record, including the authoritarian monarchy’s criminalization of homosexuality and the well-documented abuse of migrant workers.
Yet Mr. Stewart voiced no such disapproval when he performed in 2010 in Dubai or 2017 in Abu Dhabi, cities in the nearby United Arab Emirates — a country that also has an authoritarian monarchy and has faced allegations of human rights violations but that has more successfully cultivated a Western-friendly image. Mr. Stewart declined a request for comment through his public relations firm. » | Vivian Nereim | Friday, November 25, 2022
Where is the logic in worshipping Allah as the One God and Creator on the one hand and then criminalizing and punishing His creation on the other? How can God be both inerrant and yet still create gay people who are considered ‘abhorrent’. Are gays not a part of God’s creation? Are gays not exactly how God wanted them to be? Or did the inerrant God err? – © Mark Alexander
