The Case Against Qatar - Foreign Policy

[flamingdem]

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/30/the_case_against_qatar_funding_extremists_salafi_syria_uae_jihad_muslim_brotherhood_taliban

* The beginning of the article says that Washington doesn't know how to be critical of nations like Qatar - I wonder if Joe Biden's critical comments yesterday were planned.

-- snip

Friends of Qatar

There is no more telling indication of Qatar's ambitions than the fact that Doha taxi drivers are perpetually lost. With construction ongoing everywhere -- part of a $100 billion infrastructure plan to prepare for hosting the 2022 World Cup -- buildings open and projects come online so fast that the city's cabbies can't keep up.

On the world stage, Qatar sees its role as no less grandiose. Beneath the high-chandeliered ceilings of Doha's five-star hotel lobbies, eager delegations from around the world make their case for support. Governments, political parties, companies, and rebel groups scurry in and out nervously, and then wait over hot tea to have their proposals considered by the relevant Qatari authorities. Which hotel the visitors stay in indicates their prospects for support. The Four Seasons and Ritz-Carlton are old favorites; Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal has stayed at the former, the Syrian opposition at the latter. The W Hotel is a posh newcomer, mostly housing eager European delegations seeking investment or natural gas. The Sheraton -- one of Doha's first hotels -- is by now passé; that's where top Darfuri rebels stayed during negotiations with the Sudanese government. Everyone wants into the network, because as one Syrian in Doha put it, "Qatar has money and Qatar can connect money."

The winners in this hustle have often been those with the longest ties to this tiny, gas-rich state -- a menagerie of leaders from the global Muslim Brotherhood. Doha was already becoming an extremist hub by the early 2000s, as government-funded think tanks and universities popped up filled with Islamist-minded thinkers. The government-funded Al Jazeera was growing across the region, offering positive media attention to Brotherhood figures across the Middle East, and many of the ruling family's top advisors were Brotherhood-linked expatriates -- men like the controversial Egyptian cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who heads the International Union of Muslim Scholars from Doha.
What Doha saw in the Muslim Brotherhood was a combination of religiosity and efficacy that seemed parallel to its own. Moreover, the Qatari ruling family sought to differentiate itself from competing monarchies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), both of which frown upon political Islam as dangerously power-seeking. It was pragmatism, argues Salah Eddin Elzein, head of the Al Jazeera Center for Studies, a think tank associated with the Qatar-owned satellite network. "Islamists came [to the region] in the 1980s, and Qatar was trying to ally itself with the forces that it saw as those most likely to be the dominant forces for the future."

But the global Muslim Brotherhood isn't Qatar's only -- or even its most important -- network. Nor does the royal family subscribe to the Brotherhood's ideals per se. Often overlooked is a second strand that tows closer to Qatar's official sympathies: the Salafi movement.

Emerging in the 1990s, activist Salafists merged the purist ideology of Saudi Arabia's clerical establishment with the politicized goals of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of these thinkers would become the first incarnations of al Qaeda, while others gained a strong foothold in liberated Kuwait, where the first activist Salafi political party was formed.
It was in Qatar that the activist Salafists found their benefactor. Over the last 15 years in particular, Doha has become a de facto operating hub for a deeply interconnected community of Salafists living in Qatar but also in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and elsewhere. Clerics have been hosted by ministries and called to talk for important events. Charities have touted the cause -- charities like the Sheikh Eid bin Mohammad al Thani Charity, regulated by the Qatari Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, which is "probably the biggest and most influential activist Salafi-controlled relief organization in the world," according to a recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
As early as 2003, the U.S. Congress was made aware that Qatari-based charities were helping move and launder money linked to al Qaeda, providing employment and documentation for key figures in the operation. At the same time, Qatar's global influence was growing: State-backed Qatar Airways began an aircraft-buying spree in 2007 to fuel its vast expansion, linking the once far-flung emirate to every corner of the world. And by 2010, Al Jazeera had evolved into the Arab world's most influential media operation, supported by a massive annual budget of $650 million.
Just as the Arab Spring invigorated opposition movements across the Middle East, so too did it electrify Qatar's network of political clients.

[flamingdem]

1. Biden's comments at Harvard about Qatar etc. funding for extremists

* Volume is low

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