Now that Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies have broken off ties with Qatar due to its terror support, it’s time for the United States to do the same, Josh Block, CEO and President of The Israel Project, wrote Friday in an op-ed published in the Los Angeles Times.
Qatar by virtue of its natural gas reserves has become “one of the region’s most consequential players and one of the richest countries in the world.” But though the emirate posed as a supporter of the Arab Spring and democratic values, Qatar, ruled by the al-Thani family “has become a financier of terrorism,” Block wrote.
He noted that just one week after hosting United States Secretary of Defense James Mattis, earlier this year, Qatar hosted a conference for the Gaza-based terror group Hamas. Qatar’s support for Hamas extends beyond playing host, as the al-Thanis are major financial backers of Hamas “Last year alone,” Block wrote, “Qatar transferred $31 million to Hamas, and the country is expected to pledge an additional $100 million to Gaza.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is another beneficiary of the al-Thani’s largess and it was a major backer of the short-lived Mohammad Morsi regime in Egypt. Leaders of the Brotherhood have lived in Qatar for years and are often given a platform to spread their anti-American and anti-Western ideology to some 60 million people on Qatar’s Al Jazeera television network.
In Syria, the Qatari’s have given somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion in aid to Sunni Islamists groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda. Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Qatar’s current emir, has been lobbying to have Jabhat al-NusraMail removed from the U.S. list of terror organizations by promoting a cosmetic separation between the group and its parent organization al Qaeda.
In order to spread its influence in the West, Qatar funds think tanks and other research institutions to promote its view that Islamist groups in Syria are only interested in fighting Assad. Germany, uniquely among Western nations, has actually implicated Qatar as a sponsor of ISIS.
Qatar also has reportedly expressed warm feelings towards Iran and called the terror group Hamas “the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”
Despite “Qatar’s abysmal human rights record at home and malevolent behavior abroad,” Qatar has largely escaped scrutiny from the West. This is in part because. the United States benefits from Qatar’s al-Udeid air base, the source for its strikes against ISIS. However, “Now that our allies are publicly breaking with the Gulf state,” Block concluded, “Washington should put pressure on the government in Doha to pick a side. Qatar has gotten away with its opportunistic, two-faced foreign policy for too long.”
[Photo: The White House / YouTube ]