I had a friend who was in great shape, he did a lot of cycling and walking, who just dropped dead one day. No warning. Wall had warning signs.
Also: if you think Grant Wahl was the only person writing absolutely blistering stories about human rights violations and depredations in Qatar while attending this World Cup, think again. There are a whole lot of journalists who have far larger platforms than Grant Wahl’s substack writing and broadcasting to large audiences complete takedowns of this world cup competition.
I get where you’re coming from, and I have zero affection for the Qatari government, or the corrupt apparatus that lured FIFA into this disaster of a World Cup. But every indicator should tell us reasonably that this is just a dreadful circumstance and nothing more.
And the danger of even entertaining the illogic that leads to a conspiracy theory here is that no matter what the results of an investigation and post-mortem are, those who are prone to want to believe what would be a very far-fetched conspiracy will simply add others to the theory. “Oh, the autopsy says he died of an embolism? Sure, that’s what Biden’s White House wants you to believe…” etc.
That’s not what the article said, or at least it didn’t say what you wrote appears to mean on first glance.
Around 6500 migrant workers have died in Qatar in the 8-10 years or so since it was awarded World Cup and since the renovation and stadiums of building started. It doesn’t mean they died building the stadiums or even building anything at all. Qatar and that whole Middle East area has an obscene obsession with construction of large mega projects and it’s typically the South Asian migrant workers who work on those. They also work in many other industries (finance, oil, education etc) And these death numbers are distributed among all of those workers. There are 37 deaths among people who worked on these stadiums, and again not all those deaths are work related.
How many migrant workers (documented or undocumented) have died in US since World Cup was awarded? How many asylum-seeking parents have yet to be reunited with their children? Should the World Cup not happen here in 2026? What kind of argument is that?
Qatar, and even more so UAE (Dubai) and other places in the region have terrible policies regarding rights of migrant workers (especially blue collared ones), but this sudden hue and cry is mostly playing with numbers and forcing correlation/causation in data sets in bad faith.
England 2026. Just saying…
True enough. Though over the years since I spent time researching heavily into the Gulf states (back in my first stint in grad school, albeit a lifetime ago now), I’ve seen nothing to improve my opinion of these quasi-medieval plutocracies. I would not trust anything the Qatari government said unless it was thrice vetted by the six angels and a djinn. I’m not at all sure the idea of foul play is far-fetched really, but I do see your point about not fanning the flames.
Wow, trigger you’ve had some really bad luck when it comes to people close to you and heart atttacks. I’m so sorry to hear about that.
You’re right. I should’ve been aware of that.
I was influenced by having listened to reporters who had gone to Qatar, and visited labor camps, and collected a lot of identical stories of construction workers who were found dead in the morning for no obvious reason.
They couldn’t give a number, but it was obvious that it was a lot, and it was in every single camp.
Given the climate and how hard they were working, there was a lot to suggest that they died from exhaustion.
It’s complicated further by the fact that the Qatari regime refuses to investigate these deaths, and punish workers who speak out on working conditions.
Still, it’s my bad, and I appreciate being called on it.
We need a lot more data to be able to judge how those sites were run. I don’t think there’s anything odious about people dying during construction, because as you say, that happens on every major construction site at home as well.
You make a good argument. We have to be able to set some kind of standard.
But I also think it matters that Qatar has a particularly ignoble political purpose in buying these sports events, which is to distract from their terrible reputation in the global community.
The problem with organizations like FIFA pretending not to be political, and pretending not to see or hear politics, is that it makes them the ideal organization to use for political purposes.
As a counter-point though, I do think it’s healthy for the Qataris to be subject to actual press scrutiny at home for once in their lives. It’s our failure that we haven’t covered this as much as we should, before it became an easy front page story, but it’s very obvious that the Qatari officials are affected by it, and I think that’s positive if nothing else.
Heh. Yeah, not great, but decades and decades ago now.
But it does give me a confirmation bias of sorts. When someone who seems hale and healthy collapses and dies from a heart attack, my first thought isn’t “That’s too young for that to happen,” but rather “Oh shit, some other poor family and circle of friends is going to have to deal with this grief and shock now, too.”
Sadly, they’re not heart attacks like you see on TV or in movies. No grabbing the chest and stumbling to the knees. Sometimes it’s literally someone seeming fit as a fiddle…and then just gone.
It happens in marathons all the time. Of course they are running a marathon.
Sure. But as you’ve studied these authoritarian states, you’ve seen that the one thing they value more than anything else is control. Control of the people and the politics, sure. But also control of events and narrative. Grant Wahl’s death feels like something that the Qatari government and their corrupt officials running the World Cup would see as their biggest nightmare. It’s a chaos event that they hadn’t planned for (and they have planned for plenty of negative western press; Grant Wahl writing substacks about human rights abuses would be a yawn to the Qatari power elite.)
In the end, to me it comes down to this: which is more plausible? One, that the Qatari government – who don’t seem like super-geniuses – decided to kill an American journalist with close ties to the Biden White House through some super secret method that induces heart attack-like symptoms…or that a 48-year-old man running an exhausting schedule suffered a massive cardiac event just like millions and millions of men in their late 40s across the world.
It very publicly happened to Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen in the middle of a European Championship game. Thankfully they were able to revive him. That was one hell of a day.
We’re talking about a government who has been making a fuss about rainbow shirts. For wanting to control the narrative, they aren’t very good at it. I think it’s a bit quick to go down the conspiracy route, but from what we have seen from this government it is not controlled by rational, good willed people.
Absolutely. My point, perhaps hyperbolic in retrospect, was that the concept wasn’t a priori unthinkable. I tend now to agree with you that in this climate of information wars, it is probably best to avoid such speculation.
It looks like they’ve been handing out envelopes in Brussels.
Belgian investigators are looking into whether Qatar sought to influence positions in the Parliament in ways that “go beyond classic lobbying,” according to Knack. The police seized “roughly €600,000 in cash,” cellphones and computer equipment in the raids.
You gotta love politics. If you wanna bribe someone, you have to go through the proper channels.
I hereby volunteer to be bribed by the Qataris. Well, as long as it’s six figures or more. In Euros.
This is something that spies have been able to do for decades.
I don’t think it happened, but it isn’t going to be super difficult for a government to pull off
And leave no trace of that method postmortem?
Iocane powder has been around since the late 1980s.
:D
Of course.