international edition...by steven erlanger it is impossible to visit china these days and not...

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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2018

JACK JOHNSONQUEST TO CLEARBOXER’S NAMEPAGE 13 | SPORTS

NIGHTCLUBSTHE ORIGINALSOCIAL NETWORKPAGE 15 | CULTURE

GOING ONCE, TWICE ...BIDDING FOR PIECES OF THEROCKEFELLER MYSTIQUEPAGE TWO

past few months, 10 beoutQ channelswere live, almost all of them screeningthe ostensibly exclusive and very ex-pensive content of beIN, which ownssome of the most valuable sports rightsin France, Spain and Turkey.

The coalition countries have sub-

What do you do when your multibillion-dollar sports network has been stolen?

Executives at beIN Sports in Qatarpondered that question last week asthey stared at a bank of screens insidetheir sprawling headquarters here inDoha, the capital. On the night of May 2,the network’s main channel televisedthe deciding soccer game of the Champi-ons League semifinal between A.S.Roma and Liverpool.

They watched the beIN feed as Liver-pool scored to take an early lead. Thenthey watched the same play 10 secondslater on live coverage from beoutQ, abootlegging operation that is seeminglybased in Saudi Arabia and has roots inthe bitter political dispute between Qa-tar and a coalition of countries led by itsneighbors, Saudi Arabia and the UnitedArab Emirates.

That night, as in every night for the

jected Qatar to a blockade over the pastyear, accusing it of financing terrorism,disrupting regional unity by warmingup to Iran and harboring fugitives. Qa-tar has denied the allegations.

Now, one month before the start ofsoccer’s World Cup, the planet’s most-

watched sporting event and beIN’s sig-nature property, the audacious piracyoperation is positioned to illicitly deliverthe tournament’s 64 games to much ofthe Middle East. Qatar, despite abun-dant resources, has been powerless tostop it.

Decoder boxes embossed with the be-outQ logo have for months been avail-able across Saudi Arabia and are nowfor sale in other Arab-speaking coun-tries. A one-year subscription costs$100. A Bangladeshi worker reached byphone at Sharif Electronics in Jeddah,Saudi Arabia, this week said his shophad been selling the boxes for months.“Many people buy them,” he said.

As the Champions League semifinalunfolded last week, Tom Keaveny,beIN’s managing director for the MiddleEast who has worked in television forthree decades, gathered with a half-doz-en beIN engineers in a small roomknown as the lab with a mandate: Dis-rupt beoutQ.

So far they have not been successful.Mr. Keaveny said beoutQ’s operation

“takes industrial scale knowledge andability and multimillion-dollar funding.”

“This isn’t someone in their bed-room,” he said.

BeoutQ’s website claims its backers QATAR, PAGE 8

A brazen act of piracyDOHA, QATAR

Qatar sports networkbelieves Saudi Arabia isbootlegging its broadcasts

BY TARIQ PANJA

A monitoring room at beIN, a sports network in Doha, Qatar, that has paid hundreds ofmillions of dollars for exclusive rights to major events, only to see them pirated.

OLYA MORVAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The most uncomfortable thing aboutbeing naked in a museum, it turns out,is the temperature. A half-hour into thefirst nudist tour of the Palais de Tokyo,a contemporary art museum in Paris, Ihad gotten used to the feeling of expo-sure, but I hadn’t acclimatized to thecold air circulating through the cavern-ous galleries.

Standing in a politically themedexhibition by the French-Algerianartist Neïl Beloufa, I began shaking myarms for warmth. Museums, I wasdiscovering, are not temperature-controlled for people wearing onlysneakers.

In drawing this conclusion, it

seemed, I wasn’t alone. JacquelineBohain, a 65-year-old retiree who hadtaken an eight-hour bus trip from theAlsace region of eastern France toattend the event on Saturday, tried towarm herself in a sliver of sunlight.Other members of the group jiggledaround to heat up. “Maybe we shouldwalk around the corner, so we canstand in the sun,” Marion Buchloh-Kollerbohm, the tour guide, suggested,and maneuvered us to another area ofthe exhibition.

The Palais de Tokyo’s “Visite Natur-iste” — the first of its kind in France —has garnered a remarkable amount ofpublic interest since it was announcedin March. Over 30,000 people indicatedon Facebook that they were interestedin the tour, and, according to LaurentLuft, 48, the president of the ParisNaturist Association, more than twomillion people visited the group’s Face-book page in recent weeks.

“I was imagining about 100 or 200people might want to come, not30,000,” he said in a telephone inter-NAKED, PAGE 2

Exposed to art, from his head to his anklesREPORTER’S NOTEBOOKPARIS

Visitors wear nothing, except maybe shoes, fortour of the Palais de Tokyo

BY THOMAS ROGERS

A section of the exhibition “Discord, Daughter of the Night” featured Japanese suits ofarmor. “Putting on clothing or an armor, it’s a statement,” one participant said.

OWEN FRANKEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The New York Times publishes opinionfrom a wide range of perspectives inhopes of promoting constructive debateabout consequential questions.

It is by now a familiar, humiliating pat-tern. European leaders cajole, argueand beg, trying to persuade PresidentTrump to change his mind on a vital is-sue for the trans-Atlantic alliance. Mr.Trump appears to enjoy the show, dan-gling them, before ultimately choosingnot to listen.

Instead, he demands compliance,seemingly bent on providing just thesplit with powerful and important alliesthat China, Iran and Russia would like toexploit.

Such is the case with the efforts to pre-serve the 2015 Iran nuclear pact. Boththe French president, Emmanuel Mac-ron, and the German chancellor, AngelaMerkel, made the pilgrimage to Wash-ington to urge Mr. Trump not to scrapthe agreement. Their failure is very sim-ilar to what happened with the Paris cli-mate accord, to what is happening nowwith unilateral American sanctions im-posed on steel and aluminum importsand to Mr. Trump’s decision to move theUnited States Embassy in Israel to Jeru-salem. And with each breach, it becomesclearer that trans-Atlantic relations arein trouble, and that the options are notgood for the United States’ closest Euro-pean allies.

However angry and humiliated, thoseallies do not seem ready to confront Mr.Trump, wishing to believe that he andhis aides can be influenced over time. Tosome, it is reminiscent of what SamuelJohnson said of second marriages: a tri-umph of hope over experience.

But there are signs that patience iswearing thin and that many are search-ing for solutions as Mr. Trump, in thename of “America First,” creates a vac-uum of trans-Atlantic leadership thatthe Europeans have so far seemed in-capable or unwilling to fill.

“The allies are certainly sick of thisbut don’t seem to have an alternative,”said Jeremy Shapiro, a former careerState Department official now at the Eu-ropean Council on Foreign Relations.

“The Europeans are invested down apath of trying to please the president,not out of belief but more hope againsthope that they will convince him,” headded. “And they only pursue this at E.U., PAGE 6

Humiliated,E.U. looks for antidote to TrumpBRUSSELS

Allies’ patience is testedafter president adds Irandeal to long list of snubs

BY STEVEN ERLANGER

It is impossible to visit China thesedays and not compare and contrast thedrama playing out in Beijing politicswith the drama playing out in Wash-ington politics. While the differencesare many, I am sorry to report thatsome of the parallels are getting tooclose for comfort.

Let’s start with the fact that theanti-corruption crackdown by Presi-dent Xi Jinping has created a climateof fear in China these days — whetherabout interacting with foreigners orsaying the wrong thing or behaving too

extravagantly so asto attract the state“anti-corruption”detectives.

But because“corruption” hasnot been clearlydefined — and canbe used to get rid ofanyone for anyreason — peopledon’t know wherethe line is, sothey’re extra cau-

tious. That’s why during a week inBeijing the most frequent expression Iheard was, “You’re not quoting me onthis, right?”

But if the Chinese are afraid to talkto one another, in America we’ve for-gotten how to talk to one another.

In Washington these days it is notuncommon for people to be invited to adinner or a public gathering and thinkto themselves: “I hope none of themwill be there.” And the them people aretalking about is not someone of a dif-ferent faith or race — which would beawful enough — but it’s someone justfrom a different political party.

In other words, in both Beijing andWashington, self-censorship, and bitingone’s tongue, is more rife than ever —but for different reasons. In Beijing it’sso you won’t get arrested. In Washing-ton it’s so you won’t get into a fight. Inboth cases, though, the net results arefewer people talking truth across ideo-logical lines.

At the same time, in China today, ifyou’re a Communist Party official orsenior bureaucrat, you have to toe theruling party’s line or you could bequickly purged or imprisoned. InAmerica today, if you’re a RepublicanParty congressman or senator, you,

Is the U.S. becominglike China?

OPINION

Thesimilarities inpropaganda,toeing theruling party’sline andpoliticalself-censorshipare disturbing.

FRIEDMAN, PAGE 11

Thomas L. Friedman

Historic victory Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, 92, being congratulated Thursday in Malaysia’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, after his coalition won a na-tional election. It is the first time that the opposition has won more seats than the group of parties that has governed the country since independence in 1957. PAGE 4

MANAN VATSYAYANA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES

EUROPEANS’ IRAN VENTURES NOW IN LIMBOCompanies that rushed to invest arelooking for ways to shield themselvesfrom American sanctions. PAGE 7

NUCLEAR DEAL’S FAILURE WORRIES ASIASome say that President Trump’s Irandecision sends the wrong signals toNorth Korea ahead of talks. PAGE 6

Democracy in Danger: Solutions for a Changing World

September 16-18, 2018

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