But these are not simply 'tyrants' we are talking about. We are talking about a sovereign state. A recognised one, even if some would try their hardest to not acknowledge their validity.
I am not excusing the atrocities you speak of. I am refuting the insinuation that any subsequent act that is NOT an atrocity is merely an attempt to 'cover up' the atrocities in the first place. Again, this is a sovereign nation state. Not some celebrity or corporation. The complexity and amount of facets to their existence is being severely belittled in favour of a narrow and myopic definition of 'evil doers'. When you start to look at them as an actual nation, the way we look at nations in the West, their deeds do not necessarily have to define them in the same way. This is a country, a 'PR exercise' is massively simplistic, this isn't Mason Greenwood.
The issue I have is the throwing around of the term 'sportswashing' any time an ME state tries to do anything OTHER than behead someone or ban homosexuality is to not acknowledge their credibility as a nation. My argument is that many in the west are too lazy to see them as anything other than 'those barbarians who do x and y', and it would likely be more convenient when the mental imagery of such places were as depicted in movies like Delta Force, with little other than desert land and men in traditional attire in Land Cruisers wielding AK-47s. The fact that the imagery has changed to what would be considered more 'normal' things - leisure, tourism, world-class medicine, architecture and of course - sport is not simply because someone wants to trick everyone into not labelling them as homphobic. It is because all countries would like world class facilities, tourism revenue etc. Not just western ones. Only in Qatar they don't allow you to be gay or drunk while doing it. Which is a valid point to disagree with, my issue is that everything else doesn't start from that position. They are simply developing their countries in the same way Israel has done so post WW2, South Africa has been doing post-apartheid and many others. They are doing it for the betterment of their people. Not for western approval.
The US, for example, is probably the only western state that allows people to simply purchase guns and use them. Unlike the UK and most (all) other western states, their state also kills people. They have a death penalty which others don't. I could list so many more things that the rest of us don't approve of but their actions will never be perceived from the starting position of those things. Perhaps because we have agreed to recognise them as real people and a real country. So as much as I abhor their gun laws, I still go there at least once a year, and I don't view every new attraction in Las Vegas as no more than an attempt to distract from the fact that they have a death penalty. It's just one of their things I disagree with, and there are things that I like. All I am saying is that as a nation, Qatar has the right to be viewed the same. 'Sportswashing', in that respect, I find highly condescending because it would be never be used of a Western State in this day and age regardless of probably anything else they chose to do. So this is not me validating any Qatari practise, it is me taking an objection to the inference that any subsequent act is nothing more than PR. A nation can do both good and bad things. Most of them do.
