Friday, June 09, 2006
Annals of the World Cup: Will the "Arab Street" revolt?
Grateful as we are to be the Power Line News "blog of the week," the least we can do is pay some attention to the World Cup, a fav of the Power Line guys. This is easy for me, because the World Cup may yet be the spark that sets the Arab Muslim world ablaze. It seems a Saudi satellite television company has bought up the World Cup rights for the entire Arab world, but has set the subscription price at a point far beyond the means of the average Arab:
With the tournament set to begin on Friday, officials and public TV executives in North Africa have been scrambling to strike deals.
Arab Radio and Television (ART), the Saudi Arabia company, holds broadcast rights in the Arab world.
Algeria President Abdelaziz Bouteflika sent his communications minister to Cairo on Monday for talks with ART.
In Morocco, a special decoder made available by ART which frees up the World Cup signal costs US$167 - in a country where the minimum wage is the equivalent of about US$231.
It is not clear what period of time the US$231 "minimum wage" applies to, but I guess that it is per year.
By all accounts, this has Arab "football" fans in an uproar.
On the streets of Algiers, where football is nearly a religion, many Algerians criticised French satellite network TPS for boosting encryption measures to halt piracy of its signal through satellite dishes, which are common in many Algerian homes.
"It's really frustrating. I was hoping to spend a calm month in front of the television watching the exploits of Zidane, Ronaldhino and Shevchenko" said Adel Acherir, an unemployed 28-year-old who lives in the poor Bab el Oued section of the Algerian capital.
However unpopular the Saudis are, this will make them more so.
2 Comments:
By 
Unknown, at
Fri Jun 09, 04:52:00 PM:
Just going off the State Department webpages and the CIA World Book, it appears that the Moroccan minimum wage is 1,800 dirhams a month (or 1,200 in the agricultural sector), and the exchange rate in 2005 was about 9 dirhams per dollar, so I would guess that minimum wage is intended to be the monthly minimum.
By The Leading Wedge, at
Fri Jun 09, 07:34:00 PM:
I watched the Germany vs Costa Rica and Ecuador vs Poland matches off an on this evening. I generally don't watch TV at all, but make an exception for exciting sporting events like the Olympics and the World Cup.
I was musing about when Iran takes the field in Germany. There has been enough written and said about Mr. Amhadinejad's possible visit to Germany after having broken German law by denying the Holocaust. What I was thinking about were the poor, veiled women who were first denied seeing a football/soccer match in Iran and who were later, "magnanimously" allowed to see them after all by President A.
I wonder what they will think and feel when they sit at home and see all those joyous, thinly clad women from Brazil and other countries freely enjoying the games. Will their instinct be to curse the decadence of the non-Muslim world, or will it be a bit of envy of the freedome women enjoy there? I rather suspect that the latter will be the case in a significant percentage of the population.
I just hope that the TV rights and the broadcaster's camera angles will show the Iranian women what we see in the West.
