Qatar Is Not Our Friend
The key to the Qatari approach lies in embracing the Muslim Brotherhood’s strategy of infiltrating Western institutions, including through the electoral process. But this does not translate into adapting to Western values, notes scholar Mark Menaldo. Instead, it advances an ideology developed by the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual founder, Sayyid Qutb, that ‘cannot accommodate democratic principles such as legal pluralism’ outside Islamic practice.
America was the main object of Qutb’s anger. He saw America, where he lived for a short time, as a society that was sick and obsessed with sex and materialism. Americans, he suggested more than half a century ago, were already at ‘a point of no return when it comes to moral redemption’. The Muslim Brotherhood calls not just for the destruction of Israel, but also for the replacement of corrupt, infidel Western democracy with an Islamic world order.
Hamas follows these principles and carries them out with brazen violence, against both Israeli civilians and the Palestinians in its charge. Qatar’s game is different. Its rulers realise it is far easier to pay off politicians, professors and sports professionals than to convert them to Islamism. ‘Qatargate’, which involved alleged pay-offs to EU politicians, revealed how the Islamic regime had penetrated and influenced Brussels.
Increasingly, Europeans look to Qatar and other Middle Eastern states to bail out their sinking economies. Britain is particularly exposed, having become ever more reliant on Qatari cash and natural gas. Paris, another faded and increasingly Muslim-dominated former world capital, also looks to Qatar to prop up France’s permanently torpid economy.
Qatar’s tactical focus is clearly working. Even as it buys credibility, Qatar – a tiny state of just over three million people, sitting atop a gusher of natural gas – uses its money to bolster jihadism both in the Middle East and across the West. It openly funds outlets such as Mekameleen TV, a Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Egyptian TV channel, which broadcasts apologia for terrorism. It also controls Al Jazeera, which despite promoting anti-American and anti-Israel propaganda around the world, has just entered an AI partnership with US tech giant Google.
This shameless profiteering has been so blatant that investor Ken Griffin, a strong GOP supporter, accused the Trumpistas of ‘enriching’ themselves through their foreign dealmaking, notably in the Gulf. How else do you explain a proposed Qatari air base in Idaho, the US base outside Doha and even a US commitment to defend the terrorist-sponsoring kingdom?
In its advocacy, Qatar’s orientation is plain. The annual Doha Forum is largely an exercise in promoting a Hamas-friendly view of the Middle East. Qatari ministers openly venerate the mostly now deceased architects of the 7 October 2023 attack on southern Israel, while continuing to host and finance Hamas’s political leadership. This year’s Doha Forum even featured a speech by key Hamas operative Khaled Mashaal, a man wanted for the murder of both Israelis and Americans. Calls for his extradition to the US will likely be ignored.
Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: The Emir of Qatar (left) and Donald Trump, via Flickr, in Public Domain.
