By Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury ——Bio and Archives--December 7, 2023
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Qatar is Hamas and Hamas is Qatar. Every missile, every one of the 30,000-40,000 Hamas terrorists, every drone, every motorcycle, every weapon and bullet and all the munitions, and the Gaza underground with its “metro” of, according to Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, over 500 kilometers of tunnels, are what Israel’s soldiers would face when they enter this death trap. All of this is Qatari money. And unfortunately, until now, no one in the Western world, including the United States is demanding punitive measure on Qatar and its ruling al Thani family for spending billions of dollars towards empowering radical Islamic terrorism and for hosting Hamas kingpins such as Ismail Haniyeh in Doha by providing their comfort and luxury. Moreover, the Qatari al Thani family is helping Hamas in expanding its business conglomerates into various countries, including the United Arab Emirates.
During a recent interview, Professor Richard Landes, an American historian and author, who specializes in medieval millennial thinking, commenting on Qatar pouring hundreds of millions of dollars each year into American academia said, “Qatar is breeding future jihadists in the United States”. He also expressed grave concern at the rise of radical Islam in the West, particularly following October 7’s Hamas pogrom in Israel, when thousands of pro-Hamas “protestors” are seen flexing muscle in Western cities.
Prof. Landes also expressed concern at the alarming rise of anti-Semitism and Western media’s cruel anti-Israel bias.
Meanwhile, when Democratic Party congresswoman Rashida Tlaib is openly condemning Israel for its war against Hamas terrorists, American First Lady Jill Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, along with prominent figures of the Democratic Party are suspiciously silent in condemning Hamas for its gruesome and bone-chilling crimes of raping Israeli women, girls and even infants. There is no mentionable international outcry in the global press, condemning Hamas for committing such crimes against humanity.
What are the reasons behind such insanity?
We are aware of Qatari broadcast network Al Jazeera’s dangerous agenda of promoting and spreading radical Islam, anti-Semitism and jihadism. For years, Qatar has been doing grave harm to the United States. Al Jazeera aired all of Osama bin Laden’s speeches. It allowed Al Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith to speak freely on air for 10 minutes, and to call for 12,000 mujahideen to join Al Qaeda-- two months before 9/11.
In 2014, the channel allowed a pledge of allegiance to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi to take place live on air. Al-Jazeera was ordered by the US Department of Justice to register as a foreign agent, but disregarded that order. And when it comes to Qatar, the US administration could not care less about violations of its own authority.
Meanwhile, Qatar, which is known for funding and promoting terrorist groups, including Hamas and for hosting a number of kingpins of this mega-terror outfit in Doha has claimed being a “victim of disinformation”, as Qatari ambassador in Washington, Meshal Al Thani, the brother of Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, published an article in the Wall Street Journal claiming that Qatar is an honest broker that is a victim of a campaign of disinformation.
The story of Afghanistan is the most telling. For years, Qatar had funded the Taliban, all the way up to their takeover of Kabul in August 2021, which involved the killing of 13 US military personnel--only to be praised by the US administration for its help in transferring Americans from Afghanistan to Qatar, after Qatar was responsible for the entire tragedy and the blood is on their hands.
With regard to Israel, it is a double tragedy. For over a decade, Qatar funded Hamas in Gaza. For over a decade, and throughout the wars--culminating in the current one --Qatar supported Hamas’ buildup of its military force.
The US’s pleading with Qatar to obtain the release of the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, instead of pressuring it to do so, shows that the US government does not realize that only massive pressure on Qatar could most quickly bring the American and other hostages home.
Just one comment by the US administration that it is considering relocating Al Udeid Air Base from Qatar (without which Qatar will cease to exist within a week) to the UAE will set the Qataris running to bring all the American hostages back home. Since when do experienced American officials conduct negotiations without the power of pressure on the side? It is childish and naïve beyond belief. They are unfit to handle tough challenges of state.
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War on Israel was declared on Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV by Hamas military commander Muhammad Deif, on the morning of the Jewish holiday and Sabbath, October 7. This amounts to a declaration of war by Qatar on Israel through Hamas. Since then, Al Jazeera has broadcast all of Hamas’s messages. Its Arabic channel is the megaphone for all of Hamas’ messages. Worse, their reporters are going all over Israel, with Israeli press passes, and are actually spying on the Israel Defense Force (IDF) and passing vital information on to Hamas in the form of reporting.
The female broadcasters of Al-Jazeera, pretending to be Westernized, could not hide their glee when reporting on the Hamas atrocities of October 7--including the rape and burning of Jewish women and girls.
Al Jazeera directed Hamas to special targets such as Israel’s natural gas facilities in the Mediterranean Sea, and brings experienced Arab generals to analyze the front and give Hamas their best advice based on information that Hamas does not even have. Al Jazeera invented the whole lie of the Al-Ahli hospital that Israel allegedly bombed, which sparked violent demonstrations across the West. Unfortunately, Western media outlets such as Reuters, Associated Press, BBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and others simply parroted Al Jazeera’s claim without even bothering verifying the fact.
Former BBC correspondent John Sergeant has refused to label Hamas as a terrorist organization, downplaying their actions against Israelis as not constituting terrorism. The contentious statement, “slitting babies’ throats is not terrorism,” has sparked outrage. Additionally, journalists from BBC’s Arabic service have been accused of celebrating Hamas’ deadly attacks on Israeli civilians.
Al Jazeera has been granted a strange and unheard-of immunity by Israel’s government. Israeli government bodies were prepared, with a legal basis, to prohibit it from operating in Israel during this war--but the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, entangled with Qatar for the past decade, blocked the move. Only he can explain why.
Clearly, he is striving to protect Qatar’s name as a mediator because if he admits that Qatar is an enemy, he will have to explain how he could allow US$1.5 billion in enemy money to be funneled to Hamas in the past decade.
Everyone in the media world knows how Qatar uses its wealth to force its way into the centers of power in the West. Qatari Ambassador to the US Meshal bin Hamad Al Thani has been discussed in the French media, based on leaked Qatari documents, regarding alleged bribing of the French minister Jean-Marie Le Guen. Meshal never sued the French news website, Blast, that reported on this; he would be the last one to write about Qatar as an honest broker.
It might be an eye-opener for the US State Department to know that this ambassador has no credibility because of his alleged involvement in bribing a French minister.
The ruling Qatari regime is notoriously inclined towards funding Islamist terrorism with the exposed agenda of promoting Islamic conquest throughout the world--including the West. With this agenda, Qatar is funding Hamas, Al Qaeda, Islamic State (ISIS), the Taliban and other jihadist terrorist groups throughout the Middle East and the world.
Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki Al-Faisal said in 2019 that Iran and Qatar had cooperated with Al Qaeda, particularly against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
David Cohen, former US Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence said that Qatar finances terrorists who live in Doha. Hamas is not the only Islamist organization that Qatar has supported over the years.
The German media news organization Die Zeit was first to report, in July 2020, on an American security contractor’s revelation that Qatar is financing Lebanese Hezbollah, an organization designated terrorist by the US and the EU.
The Al Thani family, which rules Qatar, supported the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).
Richard Clarke, counterterrorism advisor to Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who revealed Qatar’s role with regard to 9/11 through its hiding of KSM, the future mastermind of those attacks, in Doha.
When the FBI came to arrest KSM, informing only the emir of Qatar, within hours KSM disappeared. Clarke concludes as follows: “Had the Qataris handed [KSM] over to us as requested in 1996, the world might have been a very different place”.
The United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism (UNOCT) records show that Qatar finances terrorists.
In 2017, four Arab countries — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain—launched a boycott of Qatar due to the Al Thani family’s support of terrorism and the Islamic Republic of Iran. These countries also demanded that Qatar shut down Al-Jazeera.
That same year, the Subcommittee on the Middle East And North Africa of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs devoted a hearing to Qatar’s role in harboring terrorists and financing terrorism. The hearing, titled “Assessing the US-Qatar Relationship”, focused on Qatar’s material aid to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, named in the 9/11 Commission Report as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks”, and Al Qaeda and its affiliates, the Taliban, Libyan Islamists terrorists, and Hamas.
In 2019, the Saudi journalist Adnan Muhammad said on Saudi Arabia’s Saudi 24 TV: “Qatar played a role in Somalia by supporting the terrorist Al-Shabab movement, which has been a branch of Al-Qaeda since its establishment in 2004”. He added: “Qatar’s penetration of the Somali political leadership enabled it to gain control. Fahad Yasin was Al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Somalia, and he has now managed to become the head of the National Security and Intelligence Agency in Somalia”, reportedly in exchange of Qatar’s support for the government of Somalia.
In Spain in 2005, Al Jazeera correspondent Tayseer Allouni was sentenced to seven years in prison for transferring funds to Al-Qaeda--and Al-Qaeda even issued a public statement in support of him.
Al Jazeera broadcast, live, an Iraqi sniper’s killing of an American soldier--meaning that it had to coordinate with the killer to film the killing.
In 2008, the channel hosted a birthday party for the Lebanese terrorist Samir Al-Quntar, complete with a big cake, a band, and fireworks. Al-Quntar had been convicted and imprisoned in Israel for his 1979 terror attack, in which he killed a four-year-old girl by bashing her head against a rock after shooting her father at close range.
Many in the West now see it for what it is. Both militant Islam and its resurgent handmaiden antisemitism, especially among the young, are already provoking shock in the West among some liberal elite audiences. Leftwing antisemitism, long a problem that was covered up, has been vividly exposed. A reaction to this type of activism is likely to lead to greater Western acceptance to limits on immigration, course corrections on campus, and even a partial shift toward the political right, as was observed in the recent Dutch elections. But the conflict may be far from over and the cascading series of consequences have yet to run their course.
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Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury is an internationally acclaimed multi-award-winning anti-militancy journalist, writer, research-scholar, and Editor, Blitz, a newspaper publishing from Bangladesh since 2003. He regularly writes for local and international newspapers. Follow him on X @Salah_Shoaib
Editor & Publisher, Weekly Blitz weeklyblitz.net