Rogue State
The 'west' normally gets the blame for all the ills that befall the Middle East, but in this informative article for The Times Michael Burleigh points the finger at Qatar for fuelling and financing much of the Islamist violence.
The big question as ever is if these Muslim countries find it so difficult to live in peace with each other, in a political culture that respects religious differences and human rights, how can they expect to co-exist peacefully with a country like Israel?
And if you ask me, I think FIFA has made a major mistake in awarding Qatar the World Cup.
A Qatari assist puts Islamists ahead in the terror tournament
By Michael Burleigh - The Sunday Times
A Qatari assist puts Islamists ahead in the terror tournament
By Michael Burleigh - The Sunday Times
Think of Qatar and not much comes to mind: a swanky airline, ownership of prestige western assets and the prospect of hosting the 2022 World Cup, which in turn draws other giant brands as sponsors. Last week, however, Downing Street added something much more sinister to the list: “The importance of all countries working to tackle extremism and support to terrorist organisations.” This was woolly code for the message David Cameron had delivered over lunch to its visiting emir: stop funding Salafist extremists.
Qatar, which is nominally part of America’s anti-Isis coalition, says it will punish charities passing money to Islamist extremists, but David Cohen, the American Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has accused it of failing to do so. Is this Gulf statelet so rich that it can act with impunity?
The £100bn Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and the related Qatar Holding have acquired a vast portfolio of assets throughout Europe. In the UK they include Harrods, the Shard, the Olympic Park and Chelsea Barracks, plus big stakes in the stock exchange andSainsbury’s. In Germany the QIA is a major shareholder in Deutsche Bank, the Volkswagen Group, the construction company Hochtief and the engineering giant Siemens. In France it owns the department store Printemps and Paris Saint-Germain football club. These buy a lot of elite suck-up support locally.
Investments that prove ill advised (few do) don’t matter when the QIA is replenished with £19bn-£25bn a year from sales of liquid natural gas. Qatar is the world’s largest exporter,and it also has 25bn barrels of crude oil reserves.
Qatar is not content to be the Gulf’s benign equivalent of Switzerland. It has long sought to use its wealth to propagate a hardline version of Islam by bankrolling and hosting that strain’s extremists. The TV station Al Jazeera, which has separate Arabic and English channels, is the media arm of these global ambitions. Qatar is closely involved in the al-Muntada mosque in west London, which in turn is linked to Islamist mosques and schools elsewhere in the UK.
It is the links with violent Islamist groups that are most concerning. In 2012 the emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who abdicated last year in favour of his 33-year-old son Tamim, ostentatiously dispersed £250m on the Hamas regime, money that was allegedly used to buy arms and build the attack tunnels that the Israel Defence Forces destroyed in the 50 days of Operation Protective Edge. Throughout the Egyptian-led ceasefire negotiations, Qatar tried to stiffen Hamas’s intransigence, for it needs Hamas’s survival so it can profit from the good influence it claims to exert on such terrorist organisations.
Doha, Qatar’s capital, hosts Hamas’s political supremo, Khaled Meshaal. While ordinary Gazans salvage basic belongings from the ruins of their homes, Meshaal enjoys air-conditioning, a gym and a heated swimming pool in his Doha quarters, as well he might with a personal fortune estimated at £1.6bn. Much of this is derived from a Hamas tithe on goods passing through the tunnels connecting Egyptian Sinai with Gaza.
Hamas is one of several Islamist groups that Qatar has cultivated to magnify its influence by riding what it mistook as the Islamist wave of the future in the wake of the Arab spring. Doha’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs hosts the octogenarian Egyptian TV theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a spiritual influence on the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2009 he said on Arabic Al Jazeera that Hitler managed “to put the Jews in their place — even though they exaggerated the issue — this was divine punishment for them . . . Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers”. Some of Qaradawi’s associates ordered and funded al-Qaeda attacks inside Iraq and regard Isis’s cruel rampage as “great victories”.
Investing in Islamist militant political groups is not as predictable as buying the Italian fashion house Valentino or renting out the Shard. Qatar heavily backed the Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. When he was overthrown, English-language Al Jazeera entered a state of mourning. Last year Qatar invited the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Doha, but were then embarrassed when their guests flew their black banner over it.
Similarly, Qatar’s meddling emirs underestimated the resilience of the Iranian and Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria, when their licensed middlemen plumped for the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, which has since found itself squeezed by both Assad and Isis. Although there is no evidence linking Qatar with the genocidal nihilists of Isis, it must know that arms and money can drift this way or that.
These connections between Qatar and Islamist groups depend on shadowy intermediaries. In a curious linking of a charitable front organisation, football and terrorism, the US Treasury said last year that a former Qatar FA chairman, Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi — founder of the al-Karama (“dignity”) human rights organisation — had been a major financier of al-Qaeda operations. He is an associate of Ahmed al-Dakki, who has been proscribed in the United Arab Emirates for attempting to found an Islamic party while running a jihadist training camp in Syria. Doha is also home to Ali al-Sallabi, Libya’s most influential Islamist, and Qatar backs Libya Dawn, an armed gang that recently captured Tripoli and set fire to the main airport.
Since such manoeuvres incur the wrath of conservative states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar has reinsured itself with the US. It hosts the forward headquarters of Central Command and the massive US air force al-Udeid base and buys a lot of American arms. This has not prevented rifts in the six-nation Gulf Co- operation Council, of which it was a founder member.
While Qatar lines up with Turkey in backing “revolutionary” Islamist regimes, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE support the status quo. This March, Bahrain joined Saudi Arabia and the UAE in withdrawing ambassadors from Doha to protest against Qatar’s wider subversive influence. Known for playing a straight bat, the UAE has had enough of Qatar’s duplicitous and maverick behaviour. In July it detained three Qatari spies.
Qatar actively supports Islamist movements and, at a minimum, some of its citizens and honoured guests bankroll terrorist organisations with impunity. It also has abused and coerced those desperate enough to work on its £77bn World Cup projects. By the time the whistle blows at the opening game, an estimated 4,000 construction workers will have died.
In recent decades Qatar has indulged in a massive branding exercise so that the lustre of its acquisitions somehow rubs off on it. But as Qatar becomes more prominent, so the brands it has bought should be careful that this parasitic association does not sully them.
Qatar, which is nominally part of America’s anti-Isis coalition, says it will punish charities passing money to Islamist extremists, but David Cohen, the American Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has accused it of failing to do so. Is this Gulf statelet so rich that it can act with impunity?
The £100bn Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) and the related Qatar Holding have acquired a vast portfolio of assets throughout Europe. In the UK they include Harrods, the Shard, the Olympic Park and Chelsea Barracks, plus big stakes in the stock exchange andSainsbury’s. In Germany the QIA is a major shareholder in Deutsche Bank, the Volkswagen Group, the construction company Hochtief and the engineering giant Siemens. In France it owns the department store Printemps and Paris Saint-Germain football club. These buy a lot of elite suck-up support locally.
Investments that prove ill advised (few do) don’t matter when the QIA is replenished with £19bn-£25bn a year from sales of liquid natural gas. Qatar is the world’s largest exporter,and it also has 25bn barrels of crude oil reserves.
Qatar is not content to be the Gulf’s benign equivalent of Switzerland. It has long sought to use its wealth to propagate a hardline version of Islam by bankrolling and hosting that strain’s extremists. The TV station Al Jazeera, which has separate Arabic and English channels, is the media arm of these global ambitions. Qatar is closely involved in the al-Muntada mosque in west London, which in turn is linked to Islamist mosques and schools elsewhere in the UK.
It is the links with violent Islamist groups that are most concerning. In 2012 the emir, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, who abdicated last year in favour of his 33-year-old son Tamim, ostentatiously dispersed £250m on the Hamas regime, money that was allegedly used to buy arms and build the attack tunnels that the Israel Defence Forces destroyed in the 50 days of Operation Protective Edge. Throughout the Egyptian-led ceasefire negotiations, Qatar tried to stiffen Hamas’s intransigence, for it needs Hamas’s survival so it can profit from the good influence it claims to exert on such terrorist organisations.
Doha, Qatar’s capital, hosts Hamas’s political supremo, Khaled Meshaal. While ordinary Gazans salvage basic belongings from the ruins of their homes, Meshaal enjoys air-conditioning, a gym and a heated swimming pool in his Doha quarters, as well he might with a personal fortune estimated at £1.6bn. Much of this is derived from a Hamas tithe on goods passing through the tunnels connecting Egyptian Sinai with Gaza.
Hamas is one of several Islamist groups that Qatar has cultivated to magnify its influence by riding what it mistook as the Islamist wave of the future in the wake of the Arab spring. Doha’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs hosts the octogenarian Egyptian TV theologian Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a spiritual influence on the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2009 he said on Arabic Al Jazeera that Hitler managed “to put the Jews in their place — even though they exaggerated the issue — this was divine punishment for them . . . Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers”. Some of Qaradawi’s associates ordered and funded al-Qaeda attacks inside Iraq and regard Isis’s cruel rampage as “great victories”.
Investing in Islamist militant political groups is not as predictable as buying the Italian fashion house Valentino or renting out the Shard. Qatar heavily backed the Islamist regime of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. When he was overthrown, English-language Al Jazeera entered a state of mourning. Last year Qatar invited the Afghan Taliban to open an office in Doha, but were then embarrassed when their guests flew their black banner over it.
Similarly, Qatar’s meddling emirs underestimated the resilience of the Iranian and Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria, when their licensed middlemen plumped for the al-Qaeda-linked Jabhat al-Nusra, which has since found itself squeezed by both Assad and Isis. Although there is no evidence linking Qatar with the genocidal nihilists of Isis, it must know that arms and money can drift this way or that.
These connections between Qatar and Islamist groups depend on shadowy intermediaries. In a curious linking of a charitable front organisation, football and terrorism, the US Treasury said last year that a former Qatar FA chairman, Abdul Rahman Omeir al-Naimi — founder of the al-Karama (“dignity”) human rights organisation — had been a major financier of al-Qaeda operations. He is an associate of Ahmed al-Dakki, who has been proscribed in the United Arab Emirates for attempting to found an Islamic party while running a jihadist training camp in Syria. Doha is also home to Ali al-Sallabi, Libya’s most influential Islamist, and Qatar backs Libya Dawn, an armed gang that recently captured Tripoli and set fire to the main airport.
Since such manoeuvres incur the wrath of conservative states such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Qatar has reinsured itself with the US. It hosts the forward headquarters of Central Command and the massive US air force al-Udeid base and buys a lot of American arms. This has not prevented rifts in the six-nation Gulf Co- operation Council, of which it was a founder member.
While Qatar lines up with Turkey in backing “revolutionary” Islamist regimes, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and UAE support the status quo. This March, Bahrain joined Saudi Arabia and the UAE in withdrawing ambassadors from Doha to protest against Qatar’s wider subversive influence. Known for playing a straight bat, the UAE has had enough of Qatar’s duplicitous and maverick behaviour. In July it detained three Qatari spies.
Qatar actively supports Islamist movements and, at a minimum, some of its citizens and honoured guests bankroll terrorist organisations with impunity. It also has abused and coerced those desperate enough to work on its £77bn World Cup projects. By the time the whistle blows at the opening game, an estimated 4,000 construction workers will have died.
In recent decades Qatar has indulged in a massive branding exercise so that the lustre of its acquisitions somehow rubs off on it. But as Qatar becomes more prominent, so the brands it has bought should be careful that this parasitic association does not sully them.
