On that day, Germany left empty handed, not only in football by exiting the tournament, but also politically, because its blunt messages and arrogant impositions in the first World Cup hosted in the Arab world were not well received and left a bitter neo colonial taste in people’s mouths.

In a strange irony, less than a year after the German national team stumble in Qatar, The 1975, a British pop rock band, tried to impose the same guidance in another country with a Muslim majority, only to fail in a dramatic way.

During a music festival in the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur, Matty Healy, the band’s singer, shared an intimate kiss with his fellow guitarist in order to promote the rights of sexual minorities in the country. However, the plan backfired in a foolish way.

The first people to attack him, and very harshly, were Malaysian homosexuals themselves, who told Healy that they had never asked him to represent them, nor to defend their rights, nor to speak on their behalf, as if they were minors or uninformed. They also said they never asked him to place them in direct confrontation with their peaceful society, especially since he was a stranger who would soon pack his bags and leave.

In general, despite the passing years, and as we are now in the midst of the 2026 World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico, German players have once again chosen to stay silent. They might even glue their mouths shut.

Why will the Germans remain silent?

Joshua Kimmich, the star of the German national team, announced his regret over the politically charged messages Germany tried to send during the Qatar World Cup, adding humbly that players are not experts and that political matters are highly complex and should be handled by politicians.

In reality, Kimmich is not truly sorry for what he and his teammates did in Doha, and that is not his reason for leaving political matters to their specialists. And do not believe The 1975 either if they ever apologize for disrupting a music festival with rights slogans that no one there asked for.

The more accurate interpretation of Kimmich’s statements is that the role of the so-called white savior cannot be played except on people like us, the peoples of the so called underdeveloped third world. Here they practice their empty theorizing about what should be done, what must be done, and what is necessary.

Here, they decide how everything should be, when it should be, and what price must be paid for it to happen, even when they do not understand our societies. Here, they ride their moral high horses and trample with their rude hooves even the wishes and convictions of the very groups they claim to represent, paralyzing their will and pushing them out of their comfort zone.

It is the burden of the white man, as written about by the novelist Rudyard Kipling, meaning the burden of dragging us toward what they call civilization.

The white savior may not have felt regret, but he may have realized that he would be met with a fatal bullet if he tried to practice his arrogant rights-based superiority on his fellow white Americans in Texas.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Annahar