Over the weekend, Qatari regime propaganda outfit Al Jazeera published and subsequently took down an unfathomably anti-Semitic video that questioned the number of Jews murdered by the Third Reich, accused Jews of exploiting the unprecedented genocide of the Shoah in order to curry favor for a Zionist state, and argued that Zionism itself is ideologically derivative of genocidal Nazi ideology. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) deserves much in the way of credit for exposing this and helping to shame Al Jazeera into taking down the vile video.
This is truly awful stuff. Although it ought not to be breaking news that Al Jazeera, which is funded by the lavish terror-supporting emirs of the duplicitous Qatari regime and which previously served as the preferred mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, has a wee bit of an institutional anti-Semitism problem. As anti-Islamism activist David Reaboi wrote in The Washington Times in February:
Since Qatar’s most prominent export — the state-owned television network Al Jazeera — was founded in 1996, the [Muslim] Brotherhood has played a crucial role in programming and setting the editorial line, providing the network’s strong ideologically Islamist backing. …
In fact, Al Jazeera is the world’s most successful, sophisticated and influential state-directed information operation.
It is remarkably aggressive in service of Qatar’s foreign policy interests, which include four key elements: (1) undermining the stability of its neighbors, especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; (2) promoting Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood in vulnerable, Western open societies; (3) financially and diplomatically supporting violent terrorist groups like Hamas, al Qaeda and the Taliban; and (4) assisting the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, in evading US sanctions as it seeks to develop nuclear weapons.
Crucially, even Qatar’s non-Islamist, Western-aligned regional Arab foes despise the disruptive, jihadist incitement that routinely blares from Al Jazeera’s airwaves. When Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain instituted an embargo of Qatar in June 2017, one of the Western-aligned Arab nations’ leading demands was that Al Jazeera be shuttered once and for all. As but one small example, Al Jazeera gives Yusuf Al Qaradawi — the Egyptian-born, Doha-based spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood — a prominent platform. Qaradawi has engaged in on-air Holocaust denialism and incitement of suicide bombings against U.S. troops in the Middle East on Al Jazeera television. He also serves as the leading symbolic proponent of noxious Muslim Brotherhood Islamist ideology — the same ideology that serves as the intellectual progenitor and proverbial “gateway drug” for more universally recognized Islamist extremist groups such as al-Qaeda, Islamic State, and Jamaat-e-Islami. So while Muslim Brotherhood-funding Qatar and its propaganda outfit preach Islamism, the Western-aligned Arab nations recognize the Muslim Brotherhood for what it is: A terrorist group.
Qatar is a complex country. It is often deemed the wealthiest nation in the world, on a per capita basis, because it rests directly on top of the world’s largest natural gas field. Qatari emirs donate prodigiously to American higher education institutions to perniciously spread and indoctrinate Islamist bile, and Doha more generally runs a comprehensive information warfare and venality campaign that tries to influence or buy out as much of Washington, D.C. as it possibly can.
Qatar often tries to hide its tracks by sponsoring decadent, posh parties and generally holding itself out publicly as a cultural influence-maker and trendsetter. Doha even engaged in a systemic attempt last year to woo much of the Jewish pro-Israel world — alas, that proved to be a tall (though not completely failed) task, given that Qatar is the number one state funder of Hamas. More generally, it is sometimes difficult to keep track of which public figures flirt with the lucrative Qatari dole after exiting public office.
Simply put, the tiny nation of Qatar operates the most transformative, venomous, insidious, and destructive regime in the entire Sunni Muslim world. Qatar is fully isolated from its Western-aligned Arab nation brethren and instead allies with Iran, which is the number one state sponsor of global jihadism, and Turkey, which is run by vehemently anti-Western/anti-Semitic strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan and has largely supplanted Saudi Arabia as the world’s number one ideological export of extremist Sunni madrasas. Alas, Al Jazeera is merely the propaganda mouthpiece for Qatar’s uniquely terrible regime.
It is time for Americans to start recognizing Al Jazeera, including its American version, as the Qatari propaganda outfit that it so transparently is. Americans must cease treating Al Jazeera as an even mildly legitimate news source — it is no such thing. And above all else, is time for Americans to lift the veil on Qatar’s two-faced, duplicitous nature — and to call out the regime for the pro-terrorism, Jew-hating, anti-Western menace that it is.