Two England fans dressed as knights say they were accused of being “Muslim killers” by Qatari police as FIFA announced a ban on “Crusader” fancy dress.
The two men claimed they were ordered to take off their chain mail and St George shields outside England’s first match against Iran.
Social media footage of the two men showed them being led away by Qatari security.
Speaking for the first time, the two men, who did not wish to be named, told the Telegraph they were “definitely not racists” and claimed they had been dressed as knights from Monty Python rather than Crusaders.
Both are British expats who have lived in Doha for several years.
“It was ridiculous,” one of the men said. “We turned up and the police first told us we couldn’t take the swords in, even though they are made out of foam. Then a captain came running after us saying we couldn’t wear the chainmail.
“At one point one of them asked ‘Are you Muslim killers?’ Of course we aren’t Crusaders. We’ve lived here for years and we have no problems with Muslims at all – we work with them every day.
“It took two and half hours before they eventually let us in, wearing England shirts. This is just total woke madness. I blame Fifa. You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence.”
England fans have supported the team for years while dressed as St George, the patron saint often depicted as a Crusader warrior knight on horseback. The best-known Crusades took place between 1095 and 1291, when Christian armies fought to seize Jerusalem and the surrounding area from Islamic rule.
The two men said they feared reprisals from the Qatari authorities.
“Now we are worried about the Qataris coming after us – they’ve got cameras everywhere. We were dressed as Monty Python, for god’s sake. One of us had coconuts to do the horses clip-clopping from the film.
“On the way to the stadium everyone loved us, including the Qataris. They took pictures, and they couldn’t get enough of us.
The two men would only be photographed in a storage cupboard with their helmets down. One said: “We can’t show our faces, or go outside. The Qataris see everything. They’ll come after us.”
However other England fans said supporters should “read the room” and avoid dressing up in Crusader costumes at the Qatar World Cup.
One fan told the Telegraph: “I don’t dress up as a Crusader. Read the room, we’re in the Middle East. You don’t dress up as a Crusader when you’re in the Arab world. So don’t be surprised when they don’t let you in.”
Fifa announced a ban on Crusader costumes after Islamophobia charities warned the garb could be offensive to Muslims.
In a statement Fifa said: “Crusader costumes in the Arab context can be offensive against Muslims. That is why anti-discrimination colleagues asked fans to wear things inside out or change dress.”
A spokesman for Kick It Out, a charity campaigning against racism and discrimination in football, warned fans against dressing up in knight costumes in Qatar.
“We would advise fans who are attending FIFA World Cup matches that certain attire, such as fancy-dress costumes representing knights or crusaders, may not be welcomed in Qatar and other Islamic countries. Foreign Office travel advice issued before the tournament expressed that fans should familiarise themselves with local customs, and we would encourage fans to take this approach.”
In the weeks leading up to the World Cup, British police warned of the risk of England fans inadvertently offending Qatari locals.
Mark Roberts, Cheshire Chief Constable and English National Football Lead, said: “It’s a World Cup in a different part of the world with a very different culture, and I think one of my fears is that supporters not wishing to cause offence or cause problems may act in a way that inadvertently causes offence or draws attention.”
The fact they used the word “woke” in that manner suggests they knew exactly what they were doing… and were definitely trying to offend.
And the stupidity of implying that Qatari security forces are like some liberal, PC gone mad force is frankly laughable. Blaming FIFA for that lol. I’m all for slagging FIFA over this world cup but do they they seriously think this comparable to protesting for human rights?
I sort of agree with Qatar on this…dressing as crusaders to go back to the middle east?
Are they sure it wasn’t all that beer they tried to sneak in that got em kicked out…
>”This is just total woke madness. I blame Fifa. You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence.”
Un-fucking-believable, they’re just a walking fucking stereotype
“Woke” is authoritarian regimes now.
Gay people get told to “tone it down” essentially by the government (whatever that means) whereas they had no issue with this nonsense? Cunts playing weird dress up.
It would be quite easy to think “let’s dress as knights”, then get a costume that is a “Knight costume”, but really it’s a Knight’s Templar costume, without even knowing what a Knight Templar was.
If you ever needed any further confirmation that people who use the term woke are thick as fuck this is it.
so you cant wear costumes, you cant wear rainbow colored clothing, you cant drink, cant hug, cant be gay, cant have any fun it would seam
next time the world cup gets given to someone to host, lets not give it to a bunch of humourless gits who live in the desert eh?
No doubt dressing up as Oliver Cromwell at the next game against the Republic of Ireland is the follow-up.
Couldn’t give a toss about what happens the Brits that fly out to Qatar to enjoy their “blood-soaked” World Cup. Maybe they’ll care about human rights once they’re at the wrong end of them.
I know how they feel, if I saw someone dressed as Scar he’d be on trial for regicide before the week was out!
What the fuck did they expect walking around a Muslim country dressed as Christian crusaders?
“We were dressed as monty python characters”.
So which Monty Python character wore the full face helmets and the heraldic tabard?
Aren’t there fans dressed as crusaders at every England game?
Would it be offensive if a Dane came over to an England match wearing a Viking outfit?
Looks like father and son’s new video is gonna be delayed for a bit.
And yet the stores in the shopping malls in Doha are selling these crusader outfits….
What I see is two silly British expats have unintentionally invoked a religious conflict in a Muslim heartland. The problem with socially conservative societies that they don’t always appreciate the British style humour. In this case, the expats have failed to understand the religious and historic sensitivities of Muslim on the Christian church.
This is a very funny story about how two groups of terrible people can’t understand why the other is acting the way they are, when they are in fact the same kind of bigoted.
So this chainmail that these guys wear. Is it real actual chainmail made of steel, or is it some kind of theatrical prop? It looks legit, but you would think wearing actual heavy steel chainmail in the desert heat would not be fun or humorous.
I mean the actual historical crusaders were going delirious with heat stroke and having religious visions, so I don’t see how these part timers could even contemplate it just for bantz.
No fancy dress, but stoning your sister is fine! Yeah alright geez, might as well order a fry up with turkey bacon. Bunch of lemons
Because Qatari police are known for being too woke.
They should ban muslim outfits from FiFA too. They are offensive to a lot of people. Who knows they might be terrorits too
If they wanted to dress like muslim killers, they’d just need to wear a vest.
Just to point out that in the crusades, they threw arrows at the red cross! Talk about criminal…
Nobody kills Muslims like….. other Muslims. We could genuinely make the world a bette r place but the people earning lost of the money would lose a little and we CANNOT have that. Fuck them all
Wasn’t that shit like 1000 fucking years ago? Get over it and get yourself some thicker skin.
It’s their country (Qatar), so they make the rules. However, it’s sad when people still get butthurt over conflicts that they didn’t experience and happened over 700 years ago. If Qatari dressed as jihadi warriors in England or as Umayyad Caliphate soldiers in Spain, they’d probably do nothing about it.
I’m ethnically Turkish and some Turkish fans dress in Ottoman outfits for Turkey away games in Europe. If my memory serves me right there were Turks dressed like that at Euro 2008 (in Vienna, even more sensitive considering the history!) and also Euro 2016 in France. But Europeans are more relaxed on these things.
I suppose it would be insensitive to dress that way during a match against a Balkan team such as Greece, Serbia or Bulgaria whose national histories are directly tied into Ottoman oppression.
In which case England fans dressed as Knights in Qatar shouldn’t be a problem? Gulf Arabs (including Qataris) spent more time being oppressed by fellow Muslims (such as the Ottoman Turks) and the only time they were under Christian rule was in the post-WW1 era under the British Empire. The crusaders were concentrated on what is now Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
Anyway I’m just being a smart arse, wearing these kind of things in the wrong context isn’t good and a conservative Muslim country is the wrong context.
…how does anybody take offence to this. This is like us being mad at Italians for the roman invasions.
The moral confusion in these comments and on a lot of threads is insane. People seem very unwilling to link the commonplace views in the Middle East, to the religion, and instead talk about ‘the Qatari regime’ and conflating issues like working conditions, which could be country specific, with gay rights and women’s rights.
Homosexuality being illegal in Qatar and other Islamic countries isn’t something being forced upon the oppressed masses against their will. It’s extremely unlikely that the Iranian players who refused to sing their anthem in protest at the regime, feel strongly that it’s wrong for gay people to be persecuted or that homosexuality is morally acceptable. Intolerance towards gay people isn’t a niche view among Muslims, or something that there is a desire to change. Wearing an armband isn’t a demonstration of support of a peoples movement in defiance of the authorities, and we just need Harry Kane and others to get these regimes to listen to their people. Polls across the Islamic world consistently show anything from 80%-100% of the population believe that being gay is morally in acceptable, and even something like 50% of British Muslims think being gay should be illegal.
Despite this, people here seem to be more upset about these guys offending a religion, than the religion which very explicitly command the things that as a western culture, we’re upset about.
I have no doubt that these guys are dickheads who were looking for a reaction, but you can’t separate the social views in the Middle East from the religion.
> “It took two-and-a-half hours before they eventually let us in, wearing England shirts. ***This is just total woke madness.”***
Oh fuck off
I think the Qatari government has a bit of a fucking cheek complaining about Muslim killers when you consider how many of them died to build their stadiums.
You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence
This is true – waitrose had to apologise for its advertisements because it offended skin cancer patients. WTF??
The fact that they live in the emirates and still did this staggers me! What a pair of utter morons. If the locals find out who they are, they might want to get out now.
These guys seriously called the Qatari security ‘woke’?
Qatar organized shit fest but this is different. There is a difference between going against our culture and values and being provocative by wearing uniform of past religious wars, especially when you know they are religious and mentally still not ready for it.
Genuinely amazed that football fans can’t see how people might be offended with the way some people dress, considering how those same people would react if someone walks in to ‘their teams’ boozer wearing a rivals football shirt.
In NZ, the Christchurch Crusaders rugby team had to do some soul-searching/PR-analysis after the terrorist shooting where 51 Muslims were murdered. Before the shooting, the team had fully costumed crusaders on horseback came out wielding swords and it really wasn’t ok post-shooting. They kept the team name and the horses but got rid of the crusader costumes. The costumes really do hold deep meaning for some.
Crusades stopped around 1100 miles from Qatar and they werent part of the Seljuk Empire.
People need to stop comparing this to Vikings and Romans in the UK because those groups actually came to the UK unlike the Crusaders and Qatar.
Obnoxious arseholes disrespect the people in the country they are visiting as guests
Sadly, freedom of speech and democracy seems to offend everyone and everything no matter what your background, gender, religion, ethnicity, creed and ability.
Quite frankly, I’m really offended by this.
Should’ve gone full Holy Grail on their asses and chopped various limbs off for their cheek! 😉
They represent a theocratic authority dedicated to killing those they don’t like…and the crusaders were pretty awful too.
44 comments
Two England fans dressed as knights say they were accused of being “Muslim killers” by Qatari police as FIFA announced a ban on “Crusader” fancy dress.
The two men claimed they were ordered to take off their chain mail and St George shields outside England’s first match against Iran.
Social media footage of the two men showed them being led away by Qatari security.
Speaking for the first time, the two men, who did not wish to be named, told the Telegraph they were “definitely not racists” and claimed they had been dressed as knights from Monty Python rather than Crusaders.
Both are British expats who have lived in Doha for several years.
“It was ridiculous,” one of the men said. “We turned up and the police first told us we couldn’t take the swords in, even though they are made out of foam. Then a captain came running after us saying we couldn’t wear the chainmail.
“At one point one of them asked ‘Are you Muslim killers?’ Of course we aren’t Crusaders. We’ve lived here for years and we have no problems with Muslims at all – we work with them every day.
“It took two and half hours before they eventually let us in, wearing England shirts. This is just total woke madness. I blame Fifa. You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence.”
England fans have supported the team for years while dressed as St George, the patron saint often depicted as a Crusader warrior knight on horseback. The best-known Crusades took place between 1095 and 1291, when Christian armies fought to seize Jerusalem and the surrounding area from Islamic rule.
The two men said they feared reprisals from the Qatari authorities.
“Now we are worried about the Qataris coming after us – they’ve got cameras everywhere. We were dressed as Monty Python, for god’s sake. One of us had coconuts to do the horses clip-clopping from the film.
“On the way to the stadium everyone loved us, including the Qataris. They took pictures, and they couldn’t get enough of us.
The two men would only be photographed in a storage cupboard with their helmets down. One said: “We can’t show our faces, or go outside. The Qataris see everything. They’ll come after us.”
However other England fans said supporters should “read the room” and avoid dressing up in Crusader costumes at the Qatar World Cup.
One fan told the Telegraph: “I don’t dress up as a Crusader. Read the room, we’re in the Middle East. You don’t dress up as a Crusader when you’re in the Arab world. So don’t be surprised when they don’t let you in.”
Fifa announced a ban on Crusader costumes after Islamophobia charities warned the garb could be offensive to Muslims.
In a statement Fifa said: “Crusader costumes in the Arab context can be offensive against Muslims. That is why anti-discrimination colleagues asked fans to wear things inside out or change dress.”
A spokesman for Kick It Out, a charity campaigning against racism and discrimination in football, warned fans against dressing up in knight costumes in Qatar.
“We would advise fans who are attending FIFA World Cup matches that certain attire, such as fancy-dress costumes representing knights or crusaders, may not be welcomed in Qatar and other Islamic countries. Foreign Office travel advice issued before the tournament expressed that fans should familiarise themselves with local customs, and we would encourage fans to take this approach.”
In the weeks leading up to the World Cup, British police warned of the risk of England fans inadvertently offending Qatari locals.
Mark Roberts, Cheshire Chief Constable and English National Football Lead, said: “It’s a World Cup in a different part of the world with a very different culture, and I think one of my fears is that supporters not wishing to cause offence or cause problems may act in a way that inadvertently causes offence or draws attention.”
The fact they used the word “woke” in that manner suggests they knew exactly what they were doing… and were definitely trying to offend.
And the stupidity of implying that Qatari security forces are like some liberal, PC gone mad force is frankly laughable. Blaming FIFA for that lol. I’m all for slagging FIFA over this world cup but do they they seriously think this comparable to protesting for human rights?
I sort of agree with Qatar on this…dressing as crusaders to go back to the middle east?
Are they sure it wasn’t all that beer they tried to sneak in that got em kicked out…
>”This is just total woke madness. I blame Fifa. You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence.”
Un-fucking-believable, they’re just a walking fucking stereotype
“Woke” is authoritarian regimes now.
Gay people get told to “tone it down” essentially by the government (whatever that means) whereas they had no issue with this nonsense? Cunts playing weird dress up.
It would be quite easy to think “let’s dress as knights”, then get a costume that is a “Knight costume”, but really it’s a Knight’s Templar costume, without even knowing what a Knight Templar was.
If you ever needed any further confirmation that people who use the term woke are thick as fuck this is it.
so you cant wear costumes, you cant wear rainbow colored clothing, you cant drink, cant hug, cant be gay, cant have any fun it would seam
next time the world cup gets given to someone to host, lets not give it to a bunch of humourless gits who live in the desert eh?
No doubt dressing up as Oliver Cromwell at the next game against the Republic of Ireland is the follow-up.
Couldn’t give a toss about what happens the Brits that fly out to Qatar to enjoy their “blood-soaked” World Cup. Maybe they’ll care about human rights once they’re at the wrong end of them.
I know how they feel, if I saw someone dressed as Scar he’d be on trial for regicide before the week was out!
What the fuck did they expect walking around a Muslim country dressed as Christian crusaders?
“We were dressed as monty python characters”.
So which Monty Python character wore the full face helmets and the heraldic tabard?
Aren’t there fans dressed as crusaders at every England game?
Would it be offensive if a Dane came over to an England match wearing a Viking outfit?
Looks like father and son’s new video is gonna be delayed for a bit.
And yet the stores in the shopping malls in Doha are selling these crusader outfits….
What I see is two silly British expats have unintentionally invoked a religious conflict in a Muslim heartland. The problem with socially conservative societies that they don’t always appreciate the British style humour. In this case, the expats have failed to understand the religious and historic sensitivities of Muslim on the Christian church.
This is a very funny story about how two groups of terrible people can’t understand why the other is acting the way they are, when they are in fact the same kind of bigoted.
So this chainmail that these guys wear. Is it real actual chainmail made of steel, or is it some kind of theatrical prop? It looks legit, but you would think wearing actual heavy steel chainmail in the desert heat would not be fun or humorous.
I mean the actual historical crusaders were going delirious with heat stroke and having religious visions, so I don’t see how these part timers could even contemplate it just for bantz.
No fancy dress, but stoning your sister is fine! Yeah alright geez, might as well order a fry up with turkey bacon. Bunch of lemons
Because Qatari police are known for being too woke.
They should ban muslim outfits from FiFA too. They are offensive to a lot of people. Who knows they might be terrorits too
If they wanted to dress like muslim killers, they’d just need to wear a vest.
Just to point out that in the crusades, they threw arrows at the red cross! Talk about criminal…
Nobody kills Muslims like….. other Muslims. We could genuinely make the world a bette r place but the people earning lost of the money would lose a little and we CANNOT have that. Fuck them all
Wasn’t that shit like 1000 fucking years ago? Get over it and get yourself some thicker skin.
It’s their country (Qatar), so they make the rules. However, it’s sad when people still get butthurt over conflicts that they didn’t experience and happened over 700 years ago. If Qatari dressed as jihadi warriors in England or as Umayyad Caliphate soldiers in Spain, they’d probably do nothing about it.
I’m ethnically Turkish and some Turkish fans dress in Ottoman outfits for Turkey away games in Europe. If my memory serves me right there were Turks dressed like that at Euro 2008 (in Vienna, even more sensitive considering the history!) and also Euro 2016 in France. But Europeans are more relaxed on these things.
I suppose it would be insensitive to dress that way during a match against a Balkan team such as Greece, Serbia or Bulgaria whose national histories are directly tied into Ottoman oppression.
In which case England fans dressed as Knights in Qatar shouldn’t be a problem? Gulf Arabs (including Qataris) spent more time being oppressed by fellow Muslims (such as the Ottoman Turks) and the only time they were under Christian rule was in the post-WW1 era under the British Empire. The crusaders were concentrated on what is now Turkey, Cyprus, Syria, Lebanon and Israel.
Anyway I’m just being a smart arse, wearing these kind of things in the wrong context isn’t good and a conservative Muslim country is the wrong context.
…how does anybody take offence to this. This is like us being mad at Italians for the roman invasions.
The moral confusion in these comments and on a lot of threads is insane. People seem very unwilling to link the commonplace views in the Middle East, to the religion, and instead talk about ‘the Qatari regime’ and conflating issues like working conditions, which could be country specific, with gay rights and women’s rights.
Homosexuality being illegal in Qatar and other Islamic countries isn’t something being forced upon the oppressed masses against their will. It’s extremely unlikely that the Iranian players who refused to sing their anthem in protest at the regime, feel strongly that it’s wrong for gay people to be persecuted or that homosexuality is morally acceptable. Intolerance towards gay people isn’t a niche view among Muslims, or something that there is a desire to change. Wearing an armband isn’t a demonstration of support of a peoples movement in defiance of the authorities, and we just need Harry Kane and others to get these regimes to listen to their people. Polls across the Islamic world consistently show anything from 80%-100% of the population believe that being gay is morally in acceptable, and even something like 50% of British Muslims think being gay should be illegal.
Despite this, people here seem to be more upset about these guys offending a religion, than the religion which very explicitly command the things that as a western culture, we’re upset about.
I have no doubt that these guys are dickheads who were looking for a reaction, but you can’t separate the social views in the Middle East from the religion.
> “It took two-and-a-half hours before they eventually let us in, wearing England shirts. ***This is just total woke madness.”***
Oh fuck off
I think the Qatari government has a bit of a fucking cheek complaining about Muslim killers when you consider how many of them died to build their stadiums.
You can’t wear anything nowadays without someone taking offence
This is true – waitrose had to apologise for its advertisements because it offended skin cancer patients. WTF??
The fact that they live in the emirates and still did this staggers me! What a pair of utter morons. If the locals find out who they are, they might want to get out now.
These guys seriously called the Qatari security ‘woke’?
Qatar organized shit fest but this is different. There is a difference between going against our culture and values and being provocative by wearing uniform of past religious wars, especially when you know they are religious and mentally still not ready for it.
Genuinely amazed that football fans can’t see how people might be offended with the way some people dress, considering how those same people would react if someone walks in to ‘their teams’ boozer wearing a rivals football shirt.
In NZ, the Christchurch Crusaders rugby team had to do some soul-searching/PR-analysis after the terrorist shooting where 51 Muslims were murdered. Before the shooting, the team had fully costumed crusaders on horseback came out wielding swords and it really wasn’t ok post-shooting. They kept the team name and the horses but got rid of the crusader costumes. The costumes really do hold deep meaning for some.
Crusades stopped around 1100 miles from Qatar and they werent part of the Seljuk Empire.
People need to stop comparing this to Vikings and Romans in the UK because those groups actually came to the UK unlike the Crusaders and Qatar.
Obnoxious arseholes disrespect the people in the country they are visiting as guests
Sadly, freedom of speech and democracy seems to offend everyone and everything no matter what your background, gender, religion, ethnicity, creed and ability.
Quite frankly, I’m really offended by this.
Should’ve gone full Holy Grail on their asses and chopped various limbs off for their cheek! 😉
They represent a theocratic authority dedicated to killing those they don’t like…and the crusaders were pretty awful too.